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Pentaho

Pentaho

Overview

What is Pentaho?

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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Pentaho has proven to be a valuable tool for users across a range of industries and business functions. Users have found value in using …
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Best for Reporting and Dashboard

10 out of 10
April 12, 2022
I use Pentaho for reporting and dashboard development. We develop the reports and integrate them with different database sources. It …
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Pentaho - Yay or Nay?

6 out of 10
November 04, 2016
Incentivized
I worked in a small-size private consulting firm that used Pentaho for analytics and reporting firm-wide. It catered to clients in a broad …
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Popular Features

View all 28 features
  • Publish to PDF (19)
    9.7
    97%
  • Role-Based Security Model (19)
    9.5
    95%
  • Multi-User Support (named login) (20)
    9.3
    93%
  • Formatting capabilities (19)
    8.3
    83%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is Pentaho?

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Microsoft Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance and security.

What is SAP Lumira Discovery?

SAP Lumira Discovery is SAP’s data visualization and discovery application. It facilitates data discovery, visualization, and analysis by assisting users with creation of dashboards, infographics, presentations, data facets, tag clouds, and more.

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Product Demos

Pentaho and Hadoop Demo

YouTube

Adempiere Pentaho Demo - Products & Sales figures

YouTube

Agile BI with Pentaho BI Suite Demo

YouTube

Google Analytics (part 1/2) - Pentaho Data Integration Demo

YouTube

PENTAHO DATA INTEGRATION TOOL DEMO

YouTube

Control de Mando (Dashboard) con Pentaho de Matrix CPM Solutions

YouTube
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

9
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.7
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

9.6
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

8.2
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

9.1
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.3
Avg 8.0

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another

8.6
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

Pentaho Integrations

Pentaho Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Reviewers rate Report Delivery Scheduling and Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete) highest, with a score of 9.9.

The most common users of Pentaho are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(131)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Pentaho has proven to be a valuable tool for users across a range of industries and business functions. Users have found value in using Pentaho for building data warehouses for data migration and analytics, covering all scenarios and allowing the use of external jars for unsupported activities. Pentaho's BI stack is utilized for ETL, report delivery, and as an endpoint for custom web apps. It offers ease of learning and impressive functionality, making it a popular choice for small-size private consulting firms. Pentaho is also used by engineering departments to create data warehouse environments for multiple customers, enabling analytics usage. In addition, it serves as the primary source for Business Intelligence in many companies, used by multiple users for creating reports and evaluating work across different teams. The software's ability to handle large and complex data sets with ease has been highly regarded by users, along with its advanced features for data integration, reporting, and analytical dashboards. Overall, Pentaho meets various needs such as scheduled ETL processes, data ingestion, reporting and dashboard development, making it a flexible solution across organizations.

Wide range of tools and features: Users appreciate the flexibility of Pentaho, as it offers a wide range of tools and features that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of different users and organizations. This has been mentioned by multiple reviewers who found this feature highly customizable and easy to learn.

Excellent reporting tool: Pentaho is praised for being an excellent reporting tool, with features like data reporting, integration, data mining, and ETL. Users find it intuitive and easy to use, even for advanced users. The visual interface simplifies processes that would traditionally require writing lines of code. Many reviewers have highlighted this aspect as one of the strengths of Pentaho.

Highly accessible data integration module: Pentaho's Data Integration module is highly regarded for its maturity and ease of learning. It allows business users to quickly connect to almost any data source. The ability to preview data in a pivot view format enables early data analysis. Several users have mentioned this module as a valuable feature in their reviews.

Limited Data Visualization Capabilities: Users have expressed the need for Pentaho to improve its data visualization capabilities in order to enhance the end result of dashboards. Specifically, some users feel that the current options are limited and lack advanced features and customization.

Difficulties with Mondrian-based ROLAP: Some users have mentioned that the Mondrian based ROLAP capability does not scale up well when analyzing data for a large number of subscribers over different time periods. This has resulted in performance issues and challenges in meeting the needs of complex business requirements.

Lack of Support and Guidance for WEKA: Users believe that WEKA, the machine learning platform used by Pentaho, lacks use cases in production environments and requires more support and guidance. They have found it challenging to implement and fully leverage the potential of WEKA within their organizations due to limited resources and documentation.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-2 of 2)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Alex Meadows | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho Data Integration is used to move data into our data warehouse solution, used for various projects.
  • Data Integration. PDI handles pretty much any type of data source and can transform data and conform it to any type of business logic.
  • Object Oriented ETl Coding. Code developed in PDI can be shared across numerous jobs/transformations. This allows for resusable and maintainable code.
  • Flexibility and plugins. If the function that you are looking for is not built into the tool, it's fairly straightforward to either download or develop plugins. There is a huge community of users that build new functionality all the time.
  • Scaleable and cloud ready. PDI is able to cluster and scale out to handle huge data sets.
  • The speed at which some trouble issues get resolved could be improved.
PDI is a great alternative to proprietary tools. If your environment is just starting out using ETL tools, definitely look into using PDI. The number of features plus the ability to write flexible dynamic processes allows for much more maintainable code.
Talend and Pentaho have a lot of the same functionality, but Talend's interface is not as intuitive. Talend generates code that is then executed while Pentaho is an engine based tool with highly optimized Java code templates that are compiled at runtime.
The flexibility of the tool and the quality of support from Pentaho make this a great, relatively inexpensive alternative to the larger proprietary tools.
  • We are able to be agile with our code development.
  • We are able to have faster turn around on code development, integrate to standard tools like Git and Jenkins, and save time to release products.
1
Knowledge of Business Intelligence, Data Integration, and data usage is a must. The tools are relatively easy to learn with the given references, community, and general ecosystem but it does take time to master - as with any tool set.
Stephanie Dozier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho is currently being used for several functions within my department. The Data Integration is used as our primary ETL tool. The software does a great job with data cleansing and standardizing from multiple sources. The tool is easy enough to learn using videos out on You Tube or using the Pentaho Kettle Solutions book. We also use the Schema Editor for creating the semantic layer in the User Console reporting tool. Having defined objects available in the User consoles makes it easy for a data analyst to quickly log in and quickly get a report together. We are in the healthcare industry so much of what is being asked is counts of patients, encounters by diagnosis, practice or time period. All these items can quickly be answered very quickly via the user console.
  • A data analyst has quick access to data that would otherwise need to be pulled straight for the database. Additionally, the data dictionary is tied to an object so up keep is easy and users can scroll over the object to exactly what that measure or object represents.
  • Report presentation is clean and professional. Pentaho comes with a pretty extensive set of charting and graphing functionality out of the box that in other tools would have to be developed. Easy file output with sufficient types available to choose from. (.pdf, .xlsx, .csv)
  • The Data Integration tool is without question the best tool in the set. There is no limit to your transformation options. You can transform virtually any text file, excel file or script into a table, spreadsheet or even report. Many times we are given list of patients and file formats vary from practice to practice. With Pentaho DI we have the flexibility to take what has been provided and standardize.
  • Pentaho could use some improvement of the integration of ldap into the User Console. We have unsuccessfully been able to deploy the Pentaho User Console to partners because it does not support a federated ldap model. Even attempts at integrating to our primary ldap has proven fruitless.
  • The Pentaho Suite as a whole tends to be a resource hog. Since we work with such large data sets we often find that large requests hang up or get an "oops error" which is a standard Pentaho error when the data set is too large. It would be nice to have some indication of our limits so that we are not guessing or we can limit the data set up front.
  • Upgrades on the Suite are a bit cumbersome for our Administrators. There is not a standard backup and install package so upgrades often involve our administrator on the phone with Pentaho during the upgrades to walk through a custom install.
Pentaho is well suited for an internal environment who needs access to data quickly and offer the data up in a very professional business document. It is not suited for a reporting portal that customers can access via the internet or web. The limited security prevents us from being able to offer our Pentaho UI as a service to our partners and customers.
In a past life I have used Business Objects which is a great product but requires an army of people to support. Pentaho can be managed by a smaller team of developers because you don't have to have expertise in Universe design, Report design and ETL. Pentaho's interfaces allow for a quick ramp up of the software and support all three areas pretty easily.
Although the security piece is a major game changer in our shop, Pentaho is a great tool overall. I have known other shops to work out their security issues with Pentaho and do great things so we'll need to get through this growing pain point as well and make Pentaho our positive game changer. I am excited to see the improvements in Pentaho 5 and look forward to evangelizing it's benefits over the more high priced solutions out there.
  • Because of the security issue we have had to spin up an additional reporting portal using another vendor. This means we have two reporting tools that we must maintain and support.
  • Since Pentaho is used by a limited audience it gets sidelined as a solution that requires our customers and partners to access their reporting via the web.
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




  • Creation of reports via the User Interface are very easy. The interface offers a drag and drop method of pulling data together and filters are easily applied to create the data set needed. A fairly simple report can be completed in roughly 3-5 minutes.
  • Adding new objects to the cube can be done through the Schema Editor. The User Interface offers a standard format
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