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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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131 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 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 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 7.9
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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

(1-25 of 29)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Tableau is having some technical limitations in terms of reporting and integration. But, in the case of Pentaho, it is very effective in terms of cost and also very high user-friendly. I would strongly believe that it will add more value to the organization. That's the reason I went gracefully with Pentaho.
Rafael Grandizoli | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
With Pentaho and its open-source community version, we could start showing the power of the data process and the purpose of a data lake and data warehouse project in the company, without the need for any program language skills in the team or a developer team.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Perhaps Snowflake and SalesForce have some components which align with the Pentaho tools. The Pentaho tools have integrations with these technologies to add more value to the final users. Perhaps the only weakness I can honestly find in the Pentaho tools right now is the lack of a powerful web interface for data transformations. There is a web component from which you can access existing data transformations created with the Pentaho Data Integration tool. Still, the web component only allows visualization of the data transformation and remote execution. A complete web interface with remote execution would be excellent, and I'm sure that we might see something like this available at some point in the future.
Ali Kazempour | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Variety of output of reports and data with clearer and more tangible visual charts. Pentaho has been able to give the user a better sense of visual reporting and a variety of charts. Good features of modules and user-friendliness along with agility and reasonable price and flexibility for various industries and organizations are the positive options of this platform.
zahit bogus | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I chose Pentaho because it is an open-source and free ETL tool. In addition, JSON and XML-based data migration and conversion operations are very successful. In addition, it works in compliance with all database systems. Finally, we can make ETL packages using the windows Task Scheduler at a certain time interval.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The basic functionality of Pentaho is well matching the capabilities of some of the main competitors. We also selected Pentaho since part of the platform is open source and can be used without commercial licenses. Currently we use a mix of the open source components and the commercial components.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pentaho ranks #3 out of the four. I would always choose Qlik Sense overall since it is so incredibly fast and adaptable. It also has built-in ETL and has a much greater community. If you don't like Qlik, Tableau would be a second choice but the company is difficult to work with. Power BI would be last, it looks cool on the surface, but you need an army of low-level analysts to crank out tabular models to feet it, so the TCO is way out of line with other solutions.
Ilham AB | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Since the Pentaho platform offers a range of broad functionality across data preparation and advanced analytics, it also can be easily integrated to support many data sources and machine-learning frameworks. Based on that fact, we selected Pentaho to be used in our internal department. It also supports many of our BI use cases as required by company management or the business user. Last but not least, the Pentaho license is cheaper than their competitor.
Mihaela Olariu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • direct query in excel
In comparison with Excel, that can also work with queries pivots and dashboards, Pentaho offers much more stability from a database point of view, more security options and provides a more stable table, pivots and dashboard designs. We are also completing the business intelligence experience for our users with Kyubit.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We evaluated many typical BI software vendors including Micro-strategy, JasperSoft and Tableau. Tableau would have been a top pick if it had better support for OEM. We had to compete against Tableau in many customers to try to get them to upgrade to use our analytics and found that they were very hard to displace due to how easy it is to use.

The organization I worked for had been through other partnerships with Micro-strategy and I believe that may have had an impact on them not wanting to use them again, but I was not involved in the final decisions on that.
November 04, 2016

Pentaho - Yay or Nay?

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used Tableau, which also does a great job and has better integration features, but as a report generation/ ETL/ BI tool, I'd recommend Pentaho. I also prefer Pentaho as it is best suited for the current client base that the firm has. It fulfills specific needs with great ways of report customization.
Nikhil Karkare | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I was not with the company when they selected Pentaho over any other tool. As per my experience, I would recommend Pentaho. One of the reasons are that it is open source. If you know JAVA, you can create your own plugins. I have found its customer support pretty good and quick. And the most important thing is the cost. If you are not using the DI server, you can just use the community edition and it should fulfil your purpose too.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pentaho is not as robust or as reputable as Microsoft ETL tools, but it is great for simpler ETL solutions. It has limitations and often lacks the ability for fine-tuning, but it gets the job done and is consistently reliable. Cheaper than other products, it's a great place to start for a company interested in creating a data warehouse.
Ivan Miller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In terms of price, pentaho seems to be the clear winner for functionality that you get--especially with the community edition. If you don't need to license anything out, even the enterprise edition is fairly reasonably priced. With this in mind, it's a winner in the sense that it provides 95% of the data integration functionality that these other tools do without having to spend a fortune to do so.
Jordan Squire | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have done extensive exploration of the BI marketplace but had to eliminate many of the BI vendors due our business model and their licensing model being incompatible or cost prohibitive. We provide reporting to hundreds of clients and hundreds of thousands of end-users and most licensing is based on a per-seat model. Using Pentaho, the enterprise licensing is based on serve cores which fits our business model better and Pentaho Community Edition has no licensing. Based on your use case and number of report viewers you may not have the same licensing requirements.
Anderson L.A. | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As previously stated, Pentaho is an excellent tool for start ups and where CTOs are willing to invest in staff training. It may not be user friendly as Tableau or SAS, but once staff master it, development of new solutions becomes limitless.
Alex Meadows | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Stephanie Dozier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Itamar Steinberg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We have experience with Informatica and Talend. I think that between Talend and Pentaho it's a close fight, although I prefer, personally, Pentaho Kettle (Larger community, more resources).
I think that you can say informatica is better than both of them but it is way more expensive and the differences are small.
Let's say, I didn't find something I can't do with Pentaho - maybe it took a little bit more creativity or code (java / javascript).
Julia Gusman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I have seen several clients choose Pentaho Data Integration over SSIS for its simplicity to learn and use. I would have expected that the cost would also be a driving factor, however, once the company has invested into SQL server, they view SSIS as 'free' addition to the server so the cost factor does not count. The lack of skilled Pentaho resources on the market seems to be another factor that makes clients decide against Pentaho.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
It has been too long since we did the research (over three years) before choosing Pentaho so I cannot remember exactly which competing products we looked at. In the end, the problem with all the others was that they were too expensive for our small company. Pentaho was reasonably priced and was exactly what we were looking for.

Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SAS all provide similar, but very expensive products.
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