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Pentaho

Pentaho

Overview

What is Pentaho?

Pentaho is a suite of open source business intelligence and analytics products, now offered and supported by Hitachi Data Systems since the June 2015 acquisition.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

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

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

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

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

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N/A
Unavailable

What is Pentaho?

Pentaho is a suite of open source business intelligence and analytics products, now offered and supported by Hitachi Data Systems since the June 2015 acquisition.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

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

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Microsoft Power BI?

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

What is SAP Lumira Discovery?

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

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Product Demos

Pentaho and Hadoop Demo

YouTube

Adempiere Pentaho Demo - Products & Sales figures

YouTube

Agile BI with Pentaho BI Suite Demo

YouTube

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

YouTube

PENTAHO DATA INTEGRATION TOOL DEMO

YouTube

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

YouTube
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

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

9
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

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

8.7
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

9.6
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

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

8.2
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

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

9.1
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.3
Avg 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 31)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pentaho is very well suited to perform data extraction & data mining from various cloud storage & transform that data using various available data models. However, the software struggles when it comes to visualizing the extracted data in an appealing manner & can be difficult for end-users to get an understanding of data tables created using those models.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Rafael Grandizoli | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Any company looking to solve ETL, data science, data mining problems can solve these issues with the Pentaho tools.

From a very close perspective, I know that different industries, such as the leads generation industry, which operates with other sectors such as loans, medical insurance, and mortgage, can benefit significantly from using the Pentaho tools to perform data extraction and refine records.

Other industries such as universities use the Pentaho tools for different kinds of investigations.

Banking industries also use the Pentaho tools to perform internal data mining operations, which, as you can imagine having so much data is challenging.

Perhaps if you are a single developer trying to extract data for some machine learning process, using the Pentaho tools could be a little too much, maybe overcomplicated when some spreadsheets or using R or Python could probably get the job done. Still, complex or straightforward data transformations could suffice for the job.
Ali Kazempour | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
zahit bogus | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The Pentaho Data Integration ETL tool runs successfully on systems derived from both Windows and Unix. When designing a data warehouse, we can create ETL packets both at the Stage layer and at the DWH layer. There are many components for ETL design. We can run packages at certain time intervals through the Windows Task Scheduler. Since Pentaho Data Integration is an open-source application, it can be developed in applications to be integrated with PDI (Pentaho Data Integration). This allows you to manage the scheduler process through a separate application.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Ilham AB | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Pentaho will work great to embed analytic content with full features of Machine Learning capabilities. It supports many machine-learning frameworks and can be easily integrated. So, you also can connect with many data sources and have no worries about it. In our case, we are using it to help us create many day-to-day jobs and transformations that our internal users need. But to achieve this, we need to train our team to be able to understand the main concepts of how this software works.
Mihaela Olariu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Overall as an OEM vendor of analytics, I would say it was about average. They did help us get to market sooner than if we developed everything in-house, but I felt the dashboards were pretty ugly and I wouldn't say I was super impressed. I found the Analyzer OLAP tool to be very useful and that part would have been harder to develop in-house, but I would skip the dashboards next time and go straight to developing those in-house, which is what we ended up with in the end.
November 04, 2016

Pentaho - Yay or Nay?

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Nikhil Karkare | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Gordon Yeh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Open sourced ETL tool to help corporations load data. Very easy to learn but you have to take the time to do it! Lots of reading and exploring by yourself and there are some free jobs and transformations online to help you get started. However, we have heard and seen cases with the jobs just do not load the data entirely; it'll have issues after 50K records.
Ivan Miller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Jordan Squire | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Anderson L.A. | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Alex Meadows | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
PDI is a great alternative to proprietary tools. If your environment is just starting out using ETL tools, definitely look into using PDI. The number of features plus the ability to write flexible dynamic processes allows for much more maintainable code.
Sandro Frattura | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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)
Stephanie Dozier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Itamar Steinberg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Pros:
I find it suited for 90% of data integration projects , its a very good tool, easy to use, stable and affordable.
Cons:
I think that the big data connections are still not perfect, so if you have a NoSQL DBl / Hadoop / Cassandra, you might consider extracting the data to file from the source using MapReduce. Also, if you need bulk load, sometimes it's better to use it directly on a tool, for example Redshift / InfiniDB (that is no longer with us).
Apart than that I think it will suit you well.
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