Pentaho vs. Tableau Server

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Pentaho
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Pentaho is a suite of open source business intelligence and analytics products, now offered and supported by Hitachi Data Systems since the June 2015 acquisition.N/A
Tableau Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Tableau Server allows Tableau Desktop users to publish dashboards to a central server to be shared across their organizations. The product is designed to facilitate collaboration across the organization. It can be deployed on a server in the data center, or it can be deployed on a public cloud.
$12
Per User Per Month
Pricing
PentahoTableau Server
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Viewer
$12.00
Per User Per Month
Explorer
$35.00
Per User Per Month
Creator
$70.00
Per User Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PentahoTableau Server
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
PentahoTableau Server
Considered Both Products
Pentaho
Chose Pentaho
Pentaho ranks #3 out of the four. I would always choose Qlik Sense overall since it is so incredibly fast and adaptable. It also has built-in ETL and has a much greater community. If you don't like Qlik, Tableau would be a second choice but the company is difficult to work …
Chose Pentaho
We have done extensive exploration of the BI marketplace but had to eliminate many of the BI vendors due our business model and their licensing model being incompatible or cost prohibitive. We provide reporting to hundreds of clients and hundreds of thousands of end-users and …
Tableau Server
Chose Tableau Server
Compared to our previous version of software and tool that had been used since the beginning of the company, Tableau is reliable, fast and accurate. Some important features for advanced analytics and data visualization are not available with the previous system. Therefore it …
Chose Tableau Server
There were a lot of reasons why we chose Tableau and the least is the cost but also the way Tableau stores data in the columnar fashion instead of in Cubes. We went through a painstaking selection process and at the end, came down to a couple of vendors and we ended up with the …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
PentahoTableau Server
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Pentaho
9.0
20 Ratings
9% above category average
Tableau Server
9.3
95 Ratings
13% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports8.718 Ratings9.129 Ratings
Customizable dashboards9.818 Ratings9.494 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.618 Ratings9.381 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Pentaho
8.7
19 Ratings
7% above category average
Tableau Server
8.9
95 Ratings
9% above category average
Drill-down analysis7.718 Ratings8.795 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.319 Ratings8.593 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages9.312 Ratings8.959 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration9.617 Ratings9.589 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Pentaho
9.6
20 Ratings
14% above category average
Tableau Server
8.0
91 Ratings
4% below category average
Publish to Web9.618 Ratings9.685 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.719 Ratings9.384 Ratings
Report Versioning9.613 Ratings8.270 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling9.917 Ratings7.677 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers9.310 Ratings5.19 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Pentaho
8.2
17 Ratings
2% above category average
Tableau Server
8.5
90 Ratings
5% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)7.916 Ratings8.886 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.216 Ratings8.885 Ratings
Predictive Analytics8.314 Ratings7.864 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Pentaho
9.1
20 Ratings
6% above category average
Tableau Server
7.5
95 Ratings
14% below category average
Multi-User Support (named login)9.320 Ratings7.593 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model9.519 Ratings7.590 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)9.918 Ratings7.592 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)7.710 Ratings7.562 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Pentaho
8.3
11 Ratings
4% above category average
Tableau Server
7.7
79 Ratings
3% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access9.710 Ratings7.377 Ratings
Mobile Application7.07 Ratings7.261 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile8.711 Ratings8.068 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Pentaho
8.6
10 Ratings
8% above category average
Tableau Server
7.2
46 Ratings
10% below category average
REST API8.310 Ratings9.040 Ratings
Javascript API9.09 Ratings9.137 Ratings
iFrames7.39 Ratings9.140 Ratings
Java API8.69 Ratings5.57 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)8.910 Ratings6.19 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)9.610 Ratings4.67 Ratings
Best Alternatives
PentahoTableau Server
Small Businesses
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 8.9 out of 10
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Reveal
Reveal
Score 9.9 out of 10
Reveal
Reveal
Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Score 9.7 out of 10
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
PentahoTableau Server
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(31 ratings)
7.2
(111 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(11 ratings)
10.0
(20 ratings)
Usability
9.3
(6 ratings)
5.4
(17 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(8 ratings)
Support Rating
9.3
(7 ratings)
3.3
(18 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(4 ratings)
Online Training
9.5
(2 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
5.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(13 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
PentahoTableau Server
Likelihood to Recommend
Hitachi Vantara
Pentaho is very well suited to perform data extraction & data mining from various cloud storage & transform that data using various available data models. However, the software struggles when it comes to visualizing the extracted data in an appealing manner & can be difficult for end-users to get an understanding of data tables created using those models.
Read full review
Tableau
Tableau Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualisation tools is outstanding. Customisation and dynamic data visualisation capability is superb. The user interface takes some time getting used to.
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Pros
Hitachi Vantara
  • Integrate and synchronize with big data easily
  • Import data from any sources and different databases
  • Managing data in on-premise, hybrid and cloud environments.
  • Compatibility and flexibility of the platform with any type of scenario and any business or industry
  • Various tools in the software suite to transformation of data
  • Simple interface appearance and creative UI graphics
Read full review
Tableau
  • It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
  • Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
  • Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server
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Cons
Hitachi Vantara
  • I think the relative obscurity of the tool is a downside, not as many developers, consultants or peers you can tap into.
  • Lack of a solid user community held us back, looking at Power BI and Qlik, they have huge user communities that help each other out. Would have liked that here.
  • Smaller company means smaller sales force, and the lack of a local presence made it hard to only interact online with the account rep. Other companies have someone local who often stops by with pre-sales developers to just pitch in free of charge when they have time.
Read full review
Tableau
  • Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix
  • Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with
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Likelihood to Renew
Hitachi Vantara
I will use Pentaho until I find a better tool with a better, easier to use report designer client. For now, Pentaho has been the most powerful reporting tool for our clients because of its ability to connect to Odoo, integrate in Odoo (reports are accessible in Odoo) and the flexibility in report design and parameter integration
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Tableau
It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.
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Usability
Hitachi Vantara
The Pentaho tools are designed so you can start playing around on your own. Of course, you will need guidance at some point, but the training teams are good at guiding new users, and the online documentation is usually pretty up-to-date.
Some of the tools, such as the Pentaho Data Integration tool and the Pentaho Server, are pretty self-explanatory. The other tools maybe are not so quickly and obvious to use, but again, with some documentation and some customer support, you can find your way around them.
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Tableau
Tableau Server is unbeatable at creating easy to use, interactive dashboards for busy executives. The software also saves time for the busy analyst that is tired of always using Excel. Tableau Server is a head and shoulders improvement over Excel.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Hitachi Vantara
No answers on this topic
Tableau
Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues
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Performance
Hitachi Vantara
No answers on this topic
Tableau
While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.
Read full review
Support Rating
Hitachi Vantara
They were responsive to our questions when we raised issues. They gave us workarounds when required. They were quite knowledgeable when it came to issue analysis and providing fixes. They were forthright in informing us if a bug was not due for release soon.
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Tableau
We have consistently had highly satisfactory results every time we've reached out for help. Our contractor, used for Tableau server maintenance and dashboard development is very technically skilled. When he hits a roadblock on how to do something with Tableau, the support staff have provided timely and useful guidance. He frequently compares it to Cognos and says that while Cognos has capabilities Tableau doesn't, the bottom line value for us is a no-brainer
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In-Person Training
Hitachi Vantara
No answers on this topic
Tableau
In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.
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Online Training
Hitachi Vantara
Course Taken: DI1000 Pentaho Data Integration Fundamentals Setup A week before your class started, the instructor will start sending out class material and lab setup instructions. This is helpful so that you understand how the environment is laid out and can start reviewing the content. Ultimately it saved about a 1/2 day trying to setup with 10 other people online which was great! The Course The 3-day course was laid out like many other technical classes with 15-30 minutes instruction and 15-60 minutes of lab exercises. The instructor was very knowledgeable with the functionality from version to version and answered questions as we went along. I was amazed at some of the functionality that was available that I was not using at the time and quickly implemented changes to many existing transformations and jobs. The novice users seemed to catch on quickly and more experienced users explained how some of the functionality was used in their home environments. Towards the end there was enough time so that we were able to ask very directed questions about our own environments. Overall, I really found the class to be informative and deliver enough information to be dangerous. My skills improved and I was able to design better and efficient transformations for the HIE. Course Description: https://training.pentaho.com/instructor-led-training/pentaho-data-integration-fundamentals-di1000
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Tableau
The Tableau website is full of videos that you can follow at your own pace. As a very small company with a Tableau install, access to these free resources was incredibly useful to allowing me to implement Tableau to its potential in a reasonable and proportionate manner.
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Implementation Rating
Hitachi Vantara
Get the right people in before starting implementation. Start small and build as you go approach is time consuming and involves lot of rework. Evangalize within the organization the capabilities and limitations equally so that correct delivery expectations are set. Set expectations with the Customer that the tool cannot replace proprietary software in terms of stability/usability and that timelines could change given the new ness of the product.
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Tableau
Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either
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Alternatives Considered
Hitachi Vantara
Since the Pentaho platform offers a range of broad functionality across data preparation and advanced analytics, it also can be easily integrated to support many data sources and machine-learning frameworks. Based on that fact, we selected Pentaho to be used in our internal department. It also supports many of our BI use cases as required by company management or the business user. Last but not least, the Pentaho license is cheaper than their competitor.
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Tableau
Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
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Return on Investment
Hitachi Vantara
  • Pentaho has improved our overall business process.
  • Pentaho has helped the Managers and Directors to analyze the numbers going up and down from time to time.
  • We have a started a big project using Pentaho that is going to include all the business processes in the organization.
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Tableau
  • Tableau does take dedicated FTE to create and analyze the data. It's too complex (and powerful) a product not to have someone dedicated to developing with it.
  • There are some significant setup for the server product.
  • Once sever setup is complete, it's largely "fire and forget" until an update is necessary. The server update process is cumbersome.
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ScreenShots

Tableau Server Screenshots

Screenshot of Tableau Server interface and administration view 1.Screenshot of Tableau Server interface and administration view 2.Screenshot of Tableau Server permissions view.Screenshot of Tableau Services Manager (TSM) view 1.Screenshot of Tableau Services Manager (TSM) view 2.