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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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Learn from top reviewers

Trust Pentaho to deliver a smooth data mining experience

Rating: 9 out of 10
June 24, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We use Pentaho to store, collaborate & present data in a more modular form, which in turn helps us in making better business decisions & also allows end-users to navig...
Continue reading
Verified user
Analyst
Pentaho6 years of experience

Best for Reporting and Dashboard

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 12, 2022
Vetted ReviewVerified User
I use Pentaho for reporting and dashboard development. We develop the reports and integrate them with different database sources. It really helps us to achieve our business go...
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Verified user
Analyst
Pentaho1 year of experience

Data integration made easy

Rating: 8 out of 10
February 4, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 E...
Continue reading
Rafael Grandizoli
Manager - Product Management
Gerente de Operações
MUV
Pentaho2 years of experience

Using the Pentaho tools to solve ETL challenges

Rating: 10 out of 10
May 7, 2021
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 ...
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Verified user
Engineer
Pentaho2 years of experience

Integrate and connect all data sources with Ai engineering in the cloud environment

Rating: 9 out of 10
March 23, 2021
Vetted ReviewVerified 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 bett...
Continue reading
Ali Kazempour
Consultant - Information Technology
Information Technology Adviser
Information Technology Adviser
Pentaho2 years of experience

My Experience with Pentaho data integrator

Rating: 9 out of 10
March 2, 2020
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
I use the Pentaho Data Integration ETL tool in our enterprise business intelligence projects. I often use the Pentaho tool for data manipulation and data transport. Pentaho pl...
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zahit bogus
Consultant - Information Technology
Business Intelligence Consultant
EMO A.Åž
Pentaho2 years of experience

Robust platform that needs some refresher to compete with more modern tools

Rating: 6 out of 10
October 21, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Pentaho is used as our organizational-wide reporting and BI platform. It is bringing together data from multiple enterprise applications including ERPs, HRM, EAM and PLMs. We ...
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Verified user
Manager
Pentaho5 years of experience

A great tool, but falls under the shadow of the larger players.

Rating: 6 out of 10
June 28, 2018
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 quickl...
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Verified user
Manager
Pentaho1 year of experience

Pentaho for your business

Rating: 8 out of 10
March 19, 2018
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Currently, Pentaho was using it for our internal IT Department. We are using Pentaho to address more specific needs to integrate and analyze the company data that resides on a...
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Ilham AB
Project Manager - Information Technology
Senior Solution Architect
Three.
Pentaho10 years of experience

Pentaho can be a great solution for a company

Rating: 9 out of 10
February 23, 2018
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We are currently using this application for all the companies. We have managed to develop a lot of reports and dashboards and also bursting reports. Until now we have been abl...
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Mihaela Olariu
Analyst - Information Technology
Business Intelligence Functional Coordinator
ELDON Enclosures
Pentaho5 years of experience

Pentaho was just OK as an OEM solution

Rating: 5 out of 10
June 30, 2017
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We made a decision to use Pentaho to OEM into the analytics feature of our software and the developers had a much harder time getting it integrated than we were expecting. The...
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Verified user
Manager
Pentaho3 years of experience

Pentaho - Yay or Nay?

Rating: 6 out of 10
November 4, 2016
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 hos...
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Verified user
Consultant
Pentaho1 year of experience

Pentaho: A great DW/BI soultion

Rating: 9 out of 10
November 3, 2016
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 Analy...
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Nikhil Karkare
Engineer - Information Technology
Business Intelligence Analyst/Developer
CD-adapco
Pentaho2 years of experience

Rookie Pentaho review from an ETL veteran

Rating: 6 out of 10
November 2, 2016
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 ...
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Verified user
Consultant
Pentaho1 year of experience

Pentaho - Enhancing our ETL Capabilities

Rating: 8 out of 10
June 27, 2016
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Pentaho is used for scheduled ETL between Remedy and other platforms to help centralize and enrich data.
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Gordon Yeh
Employee - Information Technology
Remedy Architect
Apotex Inc.
Pentaho2 years of experience
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Pricing

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Pentaho

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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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

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

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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

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

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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.

9.7
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 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

What is Pentaho?

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).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(132)

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.

Reviews

(1-20 of 20)
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Best for Reporting and Dashboard

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 12, 2022
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I use Pentaho for reporting and dashboard development. We develop the reports and integrate them with different database sources. It really helps us to achieve our business goals. I would suggest Pentaho for everyone who is looking to utilize one of the best BI tools for enhancing features with satisfying business requirements. I really love it.
Pros and Cons
  • Reporting
  • Integration
  • Flexibility
Likelihood to Recommend
We did report designing for the market requirement. It was well suited to the requirement because of its apt feature. Also, both Pentaho report designer and Pentaho data integration are very good in terms of high flexibility and compatibility. Also, in terms of cost, any small organization can utilize the service.

Data integration made easy

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
February 04, 2022
RG
Rafael Grandizoli
Gerente de Operações
MUV (Marketing & Advertising, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
2 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • Data Integration with (almost) any source
  • ETL jobs
  • Manage and scheduling recurrent process
Likelihood to Recommend
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.

Integrate and connect all data sources with Ai engineering in the cloud environment

Rating: 9 out of 10
March 23, 2021
AK
Ali Kazempour
Information Technology Adviser
Information Technology Adviser (Information Technology & Services, 1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
2 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.‌
Pros and Cons
  • 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
Likelihood to Recommend
Integration Pentaho with Hitachi Vantara is a successful idea, it has increased the speed of work in all departments of the organization. We recommend Hitachi Pentaho Enterprise Edition (Lumada DataOps Suite) to our customers in all industries, information technology, human resources, hospitals, health services, financial companies, and any organization that deals with information and databases and we believe Pentaho is one of the good options because it's agile, safe, powerful, flexible and easy to learn.

Robust platform that needs some refresher to compete with more modern tools

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized
October 21, 2019
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
5 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Pentaho is used as our organizational-wide reporting and BI platform. It is bringing together data from multiple enterprise applications including ERPs, HRM, EAM and PLMs. We are using it to create both prepackaged PDF reports as well as interactive analysis reports where users can compose their on add-how reports.
Pros and Cons
  • It is relatively stable, robust and reliable.
  • Interactive analysis reports are very useful and relatively easy to use.
  • Relatively simple to integrate with other systems
Likelihood to Recommend
Pentaho is well suited for bringing together data from multiple data sources in order to perform analyses and to create reports.

If you want to create very nicely looking interactive graphs using the latest web technologies, there might be other tools that are more suited. We have also seen performance problems with large amounts of data, but it is not certain if this only was the fault of Pentaho but could also be the infrastructure around.

A great tool, but falls under the shadow of the larger players.

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized
June 28, 2018
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
The tool is fast, visually attractive and intuitive to use, but we also have an implementation of Qlik Sense and Pentaho pales in comparison to the overall capabilities. I recommend the tool, but everyone’s solution need is unique, so it may not be the right fit. Larger tools like Qlik are more versatile and easier to recommend. More expensive, yes, but you usually get what you pay for.

Pentaho can be a great solution for a company

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
February 23, 2018
MO
Mihaela Olariu
Business Intelligence Functional Coordinator
ELDON Enclosures (Business Supplies and Equipment, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
5 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We are currently using this application for all the companies. We have managed to develop a lot of reports and dashboards and also bursting reports. Until now we have been able to meet the requirements of reporting in the company in all departments. Pentaho is a good BI solution to also provide the option of creating many operational reports if you don't have a good option in your ERP.
Pros and Cons
  • SQL query + scripting will help you design different objects, tables, pivots, dashboards, linked t other reports.
  • Organizing in which way you want, synchronizing with AD is very helpful to set security/folder/group of users/single users.
  • By using Eclipse you can set another layer of security by filtering information users's need to access.
  • Sending reports y email also can be set up by security, by groups or list of users.
  • Design seems pretty secure, from time to time can fail when there is too much design.
Likelihood to Recommend
  • Operational reports, big lists of COs, POs, DOs, master information and details. Bursting reports by email and scheduling tasks are interesting and very useful.
  • Complex aggregations are useful to use in cross tabs and calculated functions in the tables. I would recommend a new tool if the purpose is dashboards, but they still can be created in Pentaho as well.

Pentaho - Yay or Nay?

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized
November 04, 2016
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • User friendly interface
  • Easy and quick report generation
  • Great report customizing features
Likelihood to Recommend
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 great DW/BI soultion

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
November 03, 2016
NK
Nikhil Karkare
Business Intelligence Analyst/Developer
CD-adapco (Computer Software, 201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
2 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited scenarios: When we need to deal with any type of RDBMS, from data input to the data loading, Pentaho is super fast. It has many bulk loaders available too. Dealing with the tables is the specialty of Pentaho.

Less Appropriate scenarios: When you have a star schemas with the bridge tables or snow-flake schemas, you will need a lot of additional work to be done in Pentaho apparently. Also, dealing with the files is not bad, but it should be improved.
** My review is for Pentaho 5.4.0.8 or previous releases.

A powerful ETL tool which is open source

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
March 01, 2016
YH
Yinghua Hu
Senior Data Scientist
CARD.com (Financial Services, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Pentaho is used as main ETL tool in the data analytics team. It solves the problem of processing and populating financial and ads related data.
Pros and Cons
  • Populate relational database
  • Transform and clean data
  • Create periodic job and generate report
  • Aggregate data
Likelihood to Recommend
Pentaho is well suited for ETL processing and database population. It is less appropriate for visualization and analytics. Key question is the benefit it can bring and the cost and robustness.

Pentaho- An adequate BI solution for users on a budget!

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized
February 26, 2016
IM
Ivan Miller
Business Intelligence Engineer
Experticity (Marketing and Advertising, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
1 year of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Pentaho is very well suited for organizations looking for end-to-end BI solutions without wanting to break the bank--particularly because the community edition has most of the functionality necessary to get you started, and it's free. Honestly though, if you have deep pockets there are probably more complete solutions out there in terms of functionality

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

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
February 23, 2016
JS
Jordan Squire
Business Intelligence Engineer
Experticity (Marketing and Advertising, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
7 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.

An implementor view on Pentaho tools.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized
February 23, 2016
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
3 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We used the Pentaho Data Integration tool to pre-process some data and fill thr production database. It was used in the department where I worked. Being a software developer I made a decision to use PDI instead of writing scripts on Python. The main advantage of PDI was supporting scaling out of the box, and the ability to run on multiple machines. When you need something less than a Hadoop cluster but bigger than self-made quick scripts it fits well.
Pros and Cons
  • The main strength of Pentaho (PDI) is that it is free. No need for additional license approvals to implement something quickly using the UI tool.
  • It has Pentaho Reporting - the ability to use reporting on top of PDI transformations is a powerful feature. PDI can handle data extraction, and with reporting you can create a simple report on this data. They all just work with each other without additional integration required.
  • And most of Pentaho projects are open-source. That helps a lot when debugging something.
Likelihood to Recommend
There are different Pentaho features, and each one has its own specific scenario where it is best suited. Reporting - is for generating boring Excel like reports, with calculations etc. For data visualization reporting is not a [good] tool. PDI is used for creation data transformations, from almost any source of data. But it is very heavy weighted. It has Hadoop and other support. But hand made code runs faster than transformation made in Spoon. And there are some algorithms that can be much easily written manually.

One of the best BI solutions for start up companies or those looking for a highly customizable tool.

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized
February 16, 2016
AL
Anderson L.A.
CTO
RTSC Consultoria Financeira (Investment Management, 1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
3 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
It's been used across the whole organization . Automated reports and dashboards are some of our core usages .
Pros and Cons
  • automated reports
  • dashboards
  • data-integration
  • Big Data
Likelihood to Recommend
Pentaho is an excellent tool for start ups and where CTOs are willing to invest in staff training Drawback : Takes a bit longer to master Pentaho in relation to the leading BI solutions.

B.I. made simple. Pentaho rocks!

Rating: 8 out of 10
June 03, 2015
SF
Sandro Frattura
Database Manager
Online Buddies, Inc. (Internet, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
4 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • 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!!
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are an open-source shop, this is a great choice. Also, if your developer has minimal experience with ETL, Pentaho is a great way to go wince it is easy to use. There is also a ton of help in the forums, in you go with Community Edition (i.e. sans support)

Pentaho - Jumping On The Band Wagon

Rating: 7 out of 10
March 16, 2015
SD
Stephanie Dozier
Business Data Analyst
Centex Systems Support Services (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.

Three Years with Pentaho and No Regrets

Rating: 10 out of 10
November 05, 2014
KP
Kenneth Panacy
Database Engineer
Online-Buddies, Inc. (Internet, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Pentaho serves several roles in our environment.

We use it for report design and delivery. The designer tool is fairly straightforward and once reports are complete they are immediately accessible to our end users.

Pentaho is used for Business Intelligence which includes totals, trends, and forecasts of sales and subscriptions of our services. Pentaho's web-based analysis tool allows our end-users to drag & drop measures and dimensions and instantly convert raw data into a variety of graphical representations. Before we had Pentaho, each view might have required a long query or static report that was hand-exported to Excel. With Pentaho's analysis tool, our sales, finance, and marketing teams have instant insight and infinitely flexible views of our data.

In the IT department, we use Pentaho as a scheduling engine for data maintenance jobs as its interface allows us to manage multiple shards from a single source.
Pros and Cons
  • Pentaho works as advertised -- it provides a truly drag-and-drop customizable interface for your data.
  • The Enterprise Suite has everything you need to start working and showing results right away.
  • Pentaho's customer support has been responsive and timely when we've had issues.
Likelihood to Recommend
Do you need to integrate data from multiple sources? Pentaho is great for this. Previously, we were SSHing files around and importing with numerous cron scripts.

Are your Finance and Marketing teams constantly asking for one-off queries? Pentaho puts this power in THEIR hands so they can pull and arrange the data they want into whatever view they want.

Do you want to pay too much for a full-featured BI solution? Pentaho is very reasonably priced, and even has a free version!

Pentaho the best BI integrator

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized
November 04, 2014
DP
Deepak Paramanand
Technical Lead
Razorsight Software Pvt. Ltd. (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
2 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Integration is best with Pentaho. If you want to overlay your product capability with Pentaho's BI Server, Data Integration, Reporting Engine, Workflow capabilities then Pentaho is the only answer. Other tools provide each of these very well, but if you have already built your product and dont want to buy Informatica, Cognos/Microstratey and SPSS/SAS then Pentaho is the way to go.
Pentaho is Java based, so no shortage of skilled Java resources who can help you integrate. We did not spend time building our own reporting engine, Data Visualization layer, Security layer, workflow capabilities. We simply used our proven transactional product and used Pentaho to fill our gaps.

Pentaho: a strong open source BI suite

Rating: 9 out of 10
November 04, 2014
NS
Nathan Smith
Systems Analyst
Olathe Medical Center (Government Administration, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
7 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.

Pentaho Report Designer Integated with Odoo v7!

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
September 16, 2014
AO
Adam O'Connor
OpenERP Software Implementation Engineer
Ursa Information Systems Incorporated (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We integrate Pentaho with Odoo for complex, custom reports that allow us to query data from PostgreSQL database across multiple data models in Odoo. I have used it to connect to Odoo via JDBC as well as directly to the web client for an object-based report. I have found the report designer client to be a bit difficult to use and buggy on my WIndows 7 machine but I have seen it working well on a Windows 8 machine. We use version 3.9.1.
Pros and Cons
  • Connect via JDBC
  • Integrates with Odoo (formerly OpenERP)
  • Grouping, summing seem to work well even though they are not intuitive as far as set up goes.
  • The multiple report output types are great (PDF, CSV, Excel, Word, Text, etc)
  • Connect via the web client of Odoo
  • Easy to build in parameters for filtering in the report
Likelihood to Recommend
Pentaho is great for companies that don't have huge budgets but want a powerful reporting tool that they can get and use for free. It is great for developers that know SQL and can learn to use a non-intuitive interface and are motivated to work through a very outdated interface.

Pentaho Open Source

Rating: 7 out of 10
June 10, 2014
Verified User
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pentaho
1 year of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I worked for a small company where everything was open source. We used a Postgres database, etc. The tool was used for some minor reporting as it was hard to get the users of this small company to make a change.
Pros and Cons
  • For an open source tool the documentation was fairly good and the support reasonable
  • The tool was relatively easy to learn without a lot of training.
Likelihood to Recommend
How much support will be available? What about software updates?
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