Skip to main content
TrustRadius
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.

Read more

Learn from top reviewers

Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing
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

Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?

156 people also want pricing

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 Analytics Cloud?

The SAP Analytics Cloud solution brings together analytics and planning with integration to SAP applications and access to heterogenous data sources. As the analytics and planning solution within SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud supports trusted insights and integrated planning…

Return to navigation

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
Return to navigation

Features

BI Standard Reporting

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

9
Avg 8.1

Ad-hoc Reporting

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

8.7
Avg 8.0

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

9.7
Avg 8.3

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.

8.1
Avg 8.0

Access Control and Security

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

9.1
Avg 8.5

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.3
Avg 7.9

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 7.8
Return to navigation

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 Customizable dashboards and 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).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews From Top Reviewers

(1-5 of 8)

Pentaho - Yay or Nay?

Rating: 6 out of 10
November 04, 2016
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
1 year of experience
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
Cons
  • Heavy software to install
  • Requires licensing to enable all features
  • Difficult to integrate with other servers
Pentaho is well suited to small - mid size firms that have specific reporting needs. It is less likely to benefit firms that already have data analytics capabilities built into multiple platforms as Pentaho is not easy to integrate with other analytics platforms. There isn't enough documentation available online, however, customer support is easy to reach.

Pentaho: a strong open source BI suite

Rating: 9 out of 10
November 04, 2014
NS
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
7 years of experience
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.
Cons
  • 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.
Pentaho provides a rich end to end BI solution. It is highly configurable. The data integration module is an especially useful and powerful. You may need a higher level of IT skills and support to work with Pentaho than you do with other BI tools. It is helpful to have SQL querying skills when creating Penthao reports. Make sure you have resources who are familiar with Pentaho or are able to get training.

Data integration made easy

Rating: 8 out of 10
February 04, 2022
RG
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
2 years of experience
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
Cons
  • Report development could be easier
  • Better integration with online repository
  • Native deployment and development environments
Pentaho requires less technical skills than other solutions to start integrating and creating complex data manipulations and preparation. By having logical skills you can just start to 'drag and drop' some boxes, connect them, and create a data pipeline, step by step.

Rookie Pentaho review from an ETL veteran

Rating: 6 out of 10
November 02, 2016
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
1 year of experience
In my organization, we use Pentaho as our go-to ETL tool. It is used by our engineering department in order to create our data warehouse environment, which is used by several customers. It allows us to create our data warehouse, which ultimately enables our end users to utilize analytics for their environments.
  • Great visualizations. Much like SSIS, the component-based model of ETL is easy to see at-a-glance in order to understand what is going on.
  • Easy roll-ups. It is very easy to encapsulate logic into separate jobs (KJBs) and transforms (KTRs), in order to group code into bite-size chunks.
  • Wide selection of tools. There are several dozen ETL steps to choose from, in a variety of different categories. Everything from file management to XML and scripting.
Cons
  • Lack of support. Unlike many Microsoft products, there is not a great wealth of support out there for Pentaho on the web. It is much harder to track down solutions.
  • Non-intuitive. There is a learning curve, and there are subtle nuances to Pentaho that even experienced ETL developers will take a while to get used to.
  • Less reputable. Despite all of Pentaho's benefits, it just hasn't gotten to that critical mass in the marketplace. Thus it does not garner as much respect as Microsoft or Oracle, which in turn makes it harder to find online support. It's a vicious cycle.
It is well suited for developers who may not be adept at strict coding, but have experience with GUI development. It is also better for rather simpler ETL, as the GUI interface has natural restrictions that make complex ETL problems challenging to solve. It may also be well suited for companies on a budget, as the free version still has enough features to be reasonably useful.

Pentaho powerful backend BI tooling, hit-and-miss data visualization

Rating: 8 out of 10
February 23, 2016
JS
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
7 years of experience
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.
Cons
  • 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.
As far as generating and maintaining a data warehouse, Pentaho does an excellent job and I would highly recommend it. For analysis and gaining insight into your data, Pentaho is excellent. For visualization, dashboarding, or executive grade reporting it may not be as beautiful or flashy as your clients require.
Return to navigation