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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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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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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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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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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!
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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.
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February 04, 2022
Data integration made easy
Pentaho is used in my organization, mainly by the IT team, creating processes and routines focused on data ingestion from many sources. We also use Pentaho to create complex ETL jobs and prepare data to be used in our data warehouse and reporting platforms that are used by other departments in the company.
- Data Integration with (almost) any source
- ETL jobs
- Manage and scheduling recurrent process
- Report development could be easier
- Better integration with online repository
- Native deployment and development environments
May 07, 2021
Using the Pentaho tools to solve ETL challenges
Before working for Hitachi Vantara, I had experience using the Pentaho Tools for personal projects mainly. I had the chance to work directly with the teams that supported the Pentaho tools, and I can tell with much objectivity that the Pentaho tools are by far one of the best options in the market when it comes to all the ETL processes. Data science requires extracting data from different sources, organizing it, and transforming it according to each necessity. Machine learning is built on top of these concepts, and with the Pentaho tools, you can accomplish most of it. Since I supported the Pentaho tools while working for Hitachi Vantara, my perspective is kind of unique; I can tell that the tools were used to solve internal problems such as integrations with our release tools and some of our agile tools, so the tools were used to enhance the newer versions.
Solving problems such as extracting metadata from thousands of files, organizing this information, and filtering it to create release files, determining how to create meta information files is just an example of the ETL cycle that can be performed with the Pentaho tools.
Solving problems such as extracting metadata from thousands of files, organizing this information, and filtering it to create release files, determining how to create meta information files is just an example of the ETL cycle that can be performed with the Pentaho tools.
- Open source, the Pentaho tools have a free to use version with a lot of support.
- Performance. The Pentaho tools can be setup so they process gigabytes of data seamlessly.
- Support from the open source developer community.
- Documentation up-to-date.
- The web versions of the Pentaho tools are limited to the server component.
- Worker nodes features are being improved but more documentation and support is always welcome.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Information is our company fuel, The information and this software are used in all parts of our company, marketing, and sales, as well as development and research we make better decisions. Pentaho is now part of Hitachi Vantara and now is more better and professional than before. Lumada DataOps Suite is built with Pentaho, for end-to-end data integration and analytics at an enterprise scale. the more databases and information we have about customers, the target market, marketing, the type of goods, the consumer market, and the demand, It is better to decide on the presentation and save money. Pentaho Enterprise Edition is great for end-to-end data integration and analytics at enterprise scale. The complexities of doing business with this platform are simplified and all information is intelligently categorized and usable.
- 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
- It has good modules and they should work on more variety and new modules suitable for the service
- Initial configuration is a bit time consuming and complicated for novice users and need smart config wizard
We rolled out Pentaho within one of our business units as a way to get at trapped data from an old home-grown CRM system that had been recently updated to .net. Pentaho quickly got us access to the data and the built-in ETL tools were easy and quick to use and learn. It enabled a team of two to provide enough data, reporting and analytical dashboards to support over $1.5B in sales.
- The built-in ETL tools are easy to learn, and can quickly import and transform any data you have.
- The excellent visualizations and charts are pleasing to the eye, and looks are important in sales and marketing presentations.
- The rollout was fast, we installed the software and were building dashboards within minutes.
- 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.
November 04, 2016
Pentaho - Yay or Nay?
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 range of industries ranging from hospitality to the public sector. The software is easy to learn and has an impressive amount of functionality incorporated. The ETL (Kettle) module is great for generating visualizations and I highly recommend this software to a beginner interested in BI.
- User friendly interface
- Easy and quick report generation
- Great report customizing features
- Heavy software to install
- Requires licensing to enable all features
- Difficult to integrate with other servers
November 03, 2016
Pentaho: A great DW/BI soultion
Pentaho is the primary source for the Business Intelligence in my company. We have many Pentaho users across the whole organization that are making a good use of Pentaho Analyzer to create the reports. At the report side, it helps the business users to evaluate all the work that has been done by the different teams across the organizations. By seeing the reports they can check, for example, how many issues are open, how many bugs have been fixed in a specific duration, how many builds failed in which phase etc.
- First thing what I have experienced about Pentaho is that it is user friendly. The best thing about Pentaho is Pentaho Data Integration. I have never used more user friendlier ETL tool like PDI. All the jobs and transformation steps are easy to understand. And I like the sample transformations and jobs that are provided with the package. It is so user friendly that, even if you don't know SQL, it will generate it for you. If you don't want to write scripts, that's fine, you can do it in PDI.
- I have found that Pentaho can be integrated with any technology or framework. I have easily and successfully integrated it with HDFS, EMR, S3, CouchDB, many different RDBMSs. I would consider it as a strength of Pentaho. Also if you are stuck or you find any error, the type of logging will have an answer for you. I found the logging mechanism very effective.
- I have mostly used Pentaho Analyzer and Schema Workbench at the BI side. It is user friendly too and we have a very few users who come to the developers to help them understanding the UI of PUC.
- Most of the companies use star schema in their Data Warehouses but they are not the pure star schemas. There are the bridge tables, group tables but when using Schema Workbench to design a cube, it gets very painful for the developers to accommodate such schema in it. To do this, I have to go to the XML file and add the new elements. I would love to see the feature where Schema Workbench can accommodate the bridge tables as they are the part of star schema too.
- When it comes to ETL, I have found PDI to be the best tool, but at the report side, it is not as good as the other tools available in the market. Especially the users always complain about the graphs in the Pentaho Analyzer. I think. the UI needs a lot of improvement.
- PDI is slow reading the JSON files. There is a fast JSON input step available in the marketplace but I think I would be great if Pentaho can make the JSON reading even faster.
- When I export the repository, I see the files names are encoded with UTF-8 encoding. It would be great, if the spaces and the special characters can be preserved while exporting a BA repository.
June 27, 2016
Pentaho - Enhancing our ETL Capabilities
Pentaho is used for scheduled ETL between Remedy and other platforms to help centralize and enrich data.
- Easy to use!
- Reliable for small jobs
- Open source
- Easy to learn
- Great community online
- Fast
- Open sourced
- Running on our vendor's VM... could be the reason why we are seeing some data limitation issues
- Future friendly
February 26, 2016
Pentaho- An adequate BI solution for users on a budget!
Pentaho's BI stack is being used by our entire company. We use their tooling for ETL, delivering reports, and as a sort of end-point for a custom web app that we've built. The end point uses xaction and Mondrian to deliver data to our front end. We also make use of the community edition of the BI server--this houses several reports that our analyst team has built as well as resources necessary to support our custom app. In the near future we'll also be using the tool's big data plugins to ingest data into our data warehouse from hive/hadoop.
- ETL, fairly wide support for a number of different data sources, a good API for writing plugins, and great out-of-the-box functionality.
- Community support and great documentation for using their tooling.
- Mondrian/OLAP, great engine for processing MDX queries.
- pentaho's analyzer tool/front-end. This doesn't come close to competing with products like Tableau.
- Pentaho Report Designer, this looks like something that was built in the early 90's and is extremely clunky to use for new-users
- Schema Workbench, would be nice to see better support for snowflake type schemas
February 24, 2016
Pentaho for Quality Assurance
At our organization we are building a data ware house for data migration and analytics. After researching several options we went for the Pentaho community edition which is an open source tool. Pentaho played big role in the implementation of ETL jobs and QA testing. The features available in Pentaho covered all of our scenarios, plus it allowed us to plug in external jars to use for any unsupported activity.
- Pentaho allows for migration from one system to another system without much trouble.
- Minimum code or almost no code expertise is required. Just get your SQL and Pentaho will do rest.
- It is difficult to verify millions of rows. But with Pentaho you can do that, this makes the QA task easier.
- Pentaho does make comparison of data between two systems fairly easier compared to other systems, but it lags in terms of output you get. The output has a merge difference option which will show a difference transaction only but if you have large data set columns it is not easy to find issues.
- Date formatting and number formatting is again an issue, both the systems should have the same datatype. It was difficult for us to compare as a new system had updated data types and pentaho failed to compare these.
February 23, 2016
Pentaho powerful backend BI tooling, hit-and-miss data visualization
We utilize the Community Edition of Pentaho across our organization for business intelligence. We use Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) to gather data from disparate data sources and perform ETL to populate our data warehouse. We also use PDI to deliver custom reports to various internal and external clients. We use Mondrian as a data engine behind our customer-facing website to process MDX queries from our customer reporting portal. We use Pentaho Report Designer to author pixel-perfect reports for internal and external audiences. We also use the Pentaho User Console for our business analysts to slice-and-dice the data for various departments. In summary, Pentaho is used to allow our internal and external clients to benchmark the performance of our products and services and gain visibility into customer behavior and activity.
- Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), which is Pentaho's ETL tool, is a powerful visual scripting tool. It is a very mature ETL tool that can process large quantities of data quickly when provided with appropriate hardware.
- Pentaho Analyzer which is Pentaho's Enterprise browser-based analysis and pivot table tool is powerful and intuitive. When provided with a well defined data warehouse schema it is easy for even non-technical users to quickly generate reports and graphs.
- Pentaho allows you to connect to virtually any datasource provided there exists a JDBC connector, REST API, or some other API end point.
- Pentaho has an open-source Community Edition which provides much of the functionality of the Enterprise Edition without any licensing fees.
- A major problem we have had with Pentaho is their enterprise licensing. As a client who understands very well what is offered within the free Community Edition we felt their mark up on their enterprise features was much too high. They wanted to charge us for migrating from MySQL to Amazon RedShift since RedShift is an "analytical database" while nearly every other database could be connected to for free. Due to licensing concerns we terminated our enterprise license.
- Pentaho's visualization tools are very capable, but have a very steep learning curve and engineering cost. Due to this we ended switching from Pentaho for the majority of our internal dashboarding and reporting to purchasing Tableau licenses. If Pentaho could improve their visualization and dashboarding capabilities, they could truly be an end-to-end BI solution.
August 19, 2015
Pentaho - Fast and Furious Data Integration
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.
June 03, 2015
B.I. made simple. Pentaho rocks!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use it for what you would expect. ETL for process and aggregate data, and then building data cubes and reports for viewing that data. We also use the ETL tool to auto-process files (CSV, XML etc) from that we receive from a few of our vendors daily.
- The Data Integration tool is fantastic. A novice user can get up to speed quickly with it and the GUI is intuitive
- Support. As an enterprise customer, I am always thrilled with the fast turnaround on support tickets that I open.
- Job Scheduling. The Job scheduler is easy to use and very reliable
- Data Analyzer Tool in "User Console". The drag and drop UI makes it easy for me end users to see the data in whatever way suits them. They can even GEO-MAP the data instantly!!
- Speed on ETL. Without a very complex setup, the ETL Job runs single threaded and can be slow for BIG jobs.
- The "Report Designer" is decent, but lacks a lot of control that you might get from more mature products (like Business Objects, for instance). Sometimes to want to rotate or reformat a chart label, and it can't be done. In other cases, it can. It is not consistent. Also, 3D charts don't work in certain circumstances. Finally, charts mapped over time, in some cases, don't have the X Axis auto-scale and so all the data points are not readable.
December 05, 2014
Data Integration with Pentaho Kettle review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I used Pentaho Kettle as a team manager of development and later as a CIO. After that I opened a company that consults and implement business intelligence solutions. We are using Pentaho mostly with the data integration module. I think that of all the modules of Pentaho, Kettle is the most complete. It can give a "fair fight" to source solutions that are not open. The problem it addresses of course is to extract data from various sources; transform them; ”play with data”; and then load it to the target. I find the transformation most valuable and rich with functionality. I even made a full scale course about it, you can find it on udemy.
- Pentaho Kettle gives you a great graphic user interface to plan your transformation and jobs.
- Pentaho Kettle makes it easy to handle errors, logging and performance.
- Pentaho Kettle has dozen of great steps like: lookup and SCD functionality.
- Several steps have performance issues like the Json input.
- The community edition does not include scheduler and job manager so you need to figure it out yourself, unless of course you buy the Enterprise edition.
- I think that web service should be easier to operate.
November 04, 2014
Pentaho the best BI integrator
Our product intended to analyse Media and Communications data and provide decision making capabilities to our end users. Whereas we built the workflow management, transactional capabilities, Pentaho provided the BI layer for our product. Analysts were our end users. Everything from data ingestion to decision making was the scope of our product. We read data across disparate data sources/formats and using our business expertise provided decision making capability.
- Data Integration. Pentaho wins hands down. You can read huge data using a Hadoop process, do your encirchment, load it to a Netezza database afterwards, finally input the data to your WEKA model to predict which Customer will churn or what offer should be made to the customer so that he/she stays put.
- BI Server. If you want to schedule a data read operation of your clickstream data, to finally burst out recommendations of next best actions to end users, Pentaho's BI Server performs this integration seamlessly.
- Mondrian. This layer provides Cube based Hierarchical data modeling on the front end and at the back end converts this OLAP structure to a ROLAP, SQL based model. Hence any relational database becomes a ROLAP engine seamlessly.
- Data Visualization. Provide richer library of data visualization capabilities. Ultimately the dashboards are the end result of all the hard work done at the back office. Yes, Pentaho has a lower TCO compared to other Products but richer data visualization capabilities would make it a winner! Pentaho has overcome this limitation by allowing external charting engines to be integrated with their product suite, but more needs to be done to strengthen core Pentaho Data Visualizaiton capabilities. Alternatively the external charting engine capabilities need to be documented and evangalized.
- Alternative to Mondrian. In our case we needed to analyse data for a million subscribers over key performance areas like Churns, Activations etc. In these scenarios semi additive measures needed to be calculated and presented in a report across days to years grains of time. In such scenarios the Mondrian based ROLAP capability did not scale up to our expectation. Pentaho needs to address such issues and fast.
- In the world of R/SAS/SPSS its hard to find use cases where WEKA was used in Production environments to solve a business problem. We would have needed some hand holding to replace our R/SPSS code to WEKA and help us build newer alogorithms on this platform ground up.
November 04, 2014
Pentaho: a strong open source BI suite
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho Data Integration was used for a variety of data integration projects, including populating a dimensional data warehouse. Data sources included relational data bases, flat files, and LDAP directories. Pentaho Reporting served reports from a range of data sources to multiple departments with security integrated with Active Directory. The Mondrian OLAP engine delivered pivot tables for slice and dice analysis.
- The Pentaho Data Integration tool is extremely versatile. I find it easier to use than comparable tools like SSIS.
- The reporting engine delivers reports in multiple formats, including Excel and PDF.
- It is easy for users to subscribe to reports for delivery by email.
- The report parameterization is very flexible, and I find it easier to use and more versatile than parameterization in Crystal.
- If using the community edition, be prepared to invest some effort in learning the product. Documentation can be vague.
- The new pivot table viewer is part of the enterprise edition. Fortunately there is a nice open source plug in called Saiku that can replace the old, difficult to use jPivot pivot table interface.
- I wish there were easier ways to audit user activity, especially to see which items have not been accessed for a long time and could be retired.
- There are not as many people who know how to use Pentaho in the market as there are people proficient in other BI tools. There is a learning curve and design patterns are not necessarily the same from one BI tool to the next.