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Pentaho has proven to be a valuable tool for users across a range of industries and business functions. Users have found value in using …
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What is Pentaho?
Pentaho is a suite of open source business intelligence and analytics products, now offered and supported by Hitachi Data Systems since the June 2015 acquisition.
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- Publish to PDF (19)9.797%
- Role-Based Security Model (19)9.595%
- Multi-User Support (named login) (20)9.393%
- Formatting capabilities (19)8.383%
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What is Pentaho?
Pentaho is a suite of open source business intelligence and analytics products, now offered and supported by Hitachi Data Systems since the June 2015 acquisition.
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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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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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TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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Pentaho has proven to be a valuable tool for users across a range of industries and business functions. Users have found value in using Pentaho for building data warehouses for data migration and analytics, covering all scenarios and allowing the use of external jars for unsupported activities. Pentaho's BI stack is utilized for ETL, report delivery, and as an endpoint for custom web apps. It offers ease of learning and impressive functionality, making it a popular choice for small-size private consulting firms. Pentaho is also used by engineering departments to create data warehouse environments for multiple customers, enabling analytics usage. In addition, it serves as the primary source for Business Intelligence in many companies, used by multiple users for creating reports and evaluating work across different teams. The software's ability to handle large and complex data sets with ease has been highly regarded by users, along with its advanced features for data integration, reporting, and analytical dashboards. Overall, Pentaho meets various needs such as scheduled ETL processes, data ingestion, reporting and dashboard development, making it a flexible solution across organizations.
Wide range of tools and features: Users appreciate the flexibility of Pentaho, as it offers a wide range of tools and features that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of different users and organizations. This has been mentioned by multiple reviewers who found this feature highly customizable and easy to learn.
Excellent reporting tool: Pentaho is praised for being an excellent reporting tool, with features like data reporting, integration, data mining, and ETL. Users find it intuitive and easy to use, even for advanced users. The visual interface simplifies processes that would traditionally require writing lines of code. Many reviewers have highlighted this aspect as one of the strengths of Pentaho.
Highly accessible data integration module: Pentaho's Data Integration module is highly regarded for its maturity and ease of learning. It allows business users to quickly connect to almost any data source. The ability to preview data in a pivot view format enables early data analysis. Several users have mentioned this module as a valuable feature in their reviews.
Limited Data Visualization Capabilities: Users have expressed the need for Pentaho to improve its data visualization capabilities in order to enhance the end result of dashboards. Specifically, some users feel that the current options are limited and lack advanced features and customization.
Difficulties with Mondrian-based ROLAP: Some users have mentioned that the Mondrian based ROLAP capability does not scale up well when analyzing data for a large number of subscribers over different time periods. This has resulted in performance issues and challenges in meeting the needs of complex business requirements.
Lack of Support and Guidance for WEKA: Users believe that WEKA, the machine learning platform used by Pentaho, lacks use cases in production environments and requires more support and guidance. They have found it challenging to implement and fully leverage the potential of WEKA within their organizations due to limited resources and documentation.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 31)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
- Excellent OLAP Services
- Multiple tools for data mining & extraction
- Plethora of options to transform data as per your needs
- Data Integration takes up too much time due to server loads.
- Data visualization has limited options to customize.
- Data modeling can take too much time depending on complexities of the model.
April 12, 2022
Best for Reporting and Dashboard
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Reporting
- Integration
- Flexibility
- Cost
- DB connector
- High user friendly
February 04, 2022
Data integration made easy
- Data Integration with (almost) any source
- ETL jobs
- Manage and scheduling recurrent process
- Report development could be easier
- Better integration with online repository
- Native deployment and development environments
May 07, 2021
Using the Pentaho tools to solve ETL challenges
- Open source, the Pentaho tools have a free to use version with a lot of support.
- Performance. The Pentaho tools can be setup so they process gigabytes of data seamlessly.
- Support from the open source developer community.
- Documentation up-to-date.
- The web versions of the Pentaho tools are limited to the server component.
- Worker nodes features are being improved but more documentation and support is always welcome.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Integrate and synchronize with big data easily
- Import data from any sources and different databases
- Managing data in on-premise, hybrid and cloud environments.
- Compatibility and flexibility of the platform with any type of scenario and any business or industry
- Various tools in the software suite to transformation of data
- Simple interface appearance and creative UI graphics
- It has good modules and they should work on more variety and new modules suitable for the service
- Initial configuration is a bit time consuming and complicated for novice users and need smart config wizard
March 02, 2020
My Experience with Pentaho data integrator
- I frequently use the Pentaho tool for data manipulation and data migration.
- I use the PentahoETL tool when designing ETL processes, transporting data to the database and designing the data warehouse.
- It is an ideal ETL tool for transporting XML and JSON-based data.
- The error codes we received in the Pentaho ETL tool are not clear enough. Explanations need to be more detailed for quick resolution of the problem.
- Scheduling ETL packages through the windows Task Scheduler makes things difficult. This process will be more efficient through the Pentaho tool.
- Database connection information is timed out after a certain period of time. I sometimes have this problem even though the database password hasn't changed.
- 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
- The type of graphs and layouts proposed for diagrams and charts are a little bit limited and partly outdated.
- For certain reports you can feel that it is not using the latest web technologies.
- The tools for creating new report template designs could be improved.
- The built-in ETL tools are easy to learn, and can quickly import and transform any data you have.
- The excellent visualizations and charts are pleasing to the eye, and looks are important in sales and marketing presentations.
- The rollout was fast, we installed the software and were building dashboards within minutes.
- I think the relative obscurity of the tool is a downside, not as many developers, consultants or peers you can tap into.
- Lack of a solid user community held us back, looking at Power BI and Qlik, they have huge user communities that help each other out. Would have liked that here.
- Smaller company means smaller sales force, and the lack of a local presence made it hard to only interact online with the account rep. Other companies have someone local who often stops by with pre-sales developers to just pitch in free of charge when they have time.
March 19, 2018
Pentaho for your business
- Easy to create simple jobs and transformations
- Mature data access and data transformation capabilities
- Suitable for complex analytic use cases
- Consume data from many sources
- At first, one needs to learn the basic concept of this software before going for the implementation. Once you are an expert on this then you will rock it.
- Some of the basic features need to be enhanced such as sharing and collaboration capabilities
- Needs to support automatically generated analytic visualizations or models
February 23, 2018
Pentaho can be a great solution for a company
- 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.
- Would like to have a format copy for different objects, tables, cross-tabs, grids, it would make design much more easier. Of course, we use template and CSS design for these objects, from time to time we design something different and it makes it much harder to do this manually for each similar object.
- Possibility to use multiple DB in the .xaction.
June 30, 2017
Pentaho was just OK as an OEM solution
- Being able to use the OLAP Analyzer tool saved our organization a lot of time in not needing to develop an OLAP tool on our own.
- The ability to customize the tool and integrate all the internationalization we required was pretty straightforward.
- The Mondrian code was hard to learn.
- The availability of resources that had experience with Pentaho and Mondrian was limited for us.
- The dashboards were slow and we found that it ended up being easier to remove the Pentaho pieces of the dashboard.
November 04, 2016
Pentaho - Yay or Nay?
- User friendly interface
- Easy and quick report generation
- Great report customizing features
- Heavy software to install
- Requires licensing to enable all features
- Difficult to integrate with other servers
November 03, 2016
Pentaho: A great DW/BI soultion
- First thing what I have experienced about Pentaho is that it is user friendly. The best thing about Pentaho is Pentaho Data Integration. I have never used more user friendlier ETL tool like PDI. All the jobs and transformation steps are easy to understand. And I like the sample transformations and jobs that are provided with the package. It is so user friendly that, even if you don't know SQL, it will generate it for you. If you don't want to write scripts, that's fine, you can do it in PDI.
- I have found that Pentaho can be integrated with any technology or framework. I have easily and successfully integrated it with HDFS, EMR, S3, CouchDB, many different RDBMSs. I would consider it as a strength of Pentaho. Also if you are stuck or you find any error, the type of logging will have an answer for you. I found the logging mechanism very effective.
- I have mostly used Pentaho Analyzer and Schema Workbench at the BI side. It is user friendly too and we have a very few users who come to the developers to help them understanding the UI of PUC.
- Most of the companies use star schema in their Data Warehouses but they are not the pure star schemas. There are the bridge tables, group tables but when using Schema Workbench to design a cube, it gets very painful for the developers to accommodate such schema in it. To do this, I have to go to the XML file and add the new elements. I would love to see the feature where Schema Workbench can accommodate the bridge tables as they are the part of star schema too.
- When it comes to ETL, I have found PDI to be the best tool, but at the report side, it is not as good as the other tools available in the market. Especially the users always complain about the graphs in the Pentaho Analyzer. I think. the UI needs a lot of improvement.
- PDI is slow reading the JSON files. There is a fast JSON input step available in the marketplace but I think I would be great if Pentaho can make the JSON reading even faster.
- When I export the repository, I see the files names are encoded with UTF-8 encoding. It would be great, if the spaces and the special characters can be preserved while exporting a BA repository.
November 02, 2016
Rookie Pentaho review from an ETL veteran
- 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.
- 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.
June 27, 2016
Pentaho - Enhancing our ETL Capabilities
- Easy to use!
- Reliable for small jobs
- Open source
- Easy to learn
- Great community online
- Fast
- Open sourced
- Running on our vendor's VM... could be the reason why we are seeing some data limitation issues
- Future friendly
March 01, 2016
A powerful ETL tool which is open source
- Populate relational database
- Transform and clean data
- Create periodic job and generate report
- Aggregate data
- It will be helpful to have modules supporting Google Adwords and Facebook API and Twilio API
- It has "add constant", but does not have "multiply constant" module.
- Unit transform module
February 26, 2016
Pentaho- An adequate BI solution for users on a budget!
- ETL, fairly wide support for a number of different data sources, a good API for writing plugins, and great out-of-the-box functionality.
- Community support and great documentation for using their tooling.
- Mondrian/OLAP, great engine for processing MDX queries.
- pentaho's analyzer tool/front-end. This doesn't come close to competing with products like Tableau.
- Pentaho Report Designer, this looks like something that was built in the early 90's and is extremely clunky to use for new-users
- Schema Workbench, would be nice to see better support for snowflake type schemas
February 24, 2016
Pentaho for Quality Assurance
- Pentaho allows for migration from one system to another system without much trouble.
- Minimum code or almost no code expertise is required. Just get your SQL and Pentaho will do rest.
- It is difficult to verify millions of rows. But with Pentaho you can do that, this makes the QA task easier.
- Pentaho does make comparison of data between two systems fairly easier compared to other systems, but it lags in terms of output you get. The output has a merge difference option which will show a difference transaction only but if you have large data set columns it is not easy to find issues.
- Date formatting and number formatting is again an issue, both the systems should have the same datatype. It was difficult for us to compare as a new system had updated data types and pentaho failed to compare these.
February 23, 2016
Pentaho powerful backend BI tooling, hit-and-miss data visualization
- Pentaho Data Integration (PDI), which is Pentaho's ETL tool, is a powerful visual scripting tool. It is a very mature ETL tool that can process large quantities of data quickly when provided with appropriate hardware.
- Pentaho Analyzer which is Pentaho's Enterprise browser-based analysis and pivot table tool is powerful and intuitive. When provided with a well defined data warehouse schema it is easy for even non-technical users to quickly generate reports and graphs.
- Pentaho allows you to connect to virtually any datasource provided there exists a JDBC connector, REST API, or some other API end point.
- Pentaho has an open-source Community Edition which provides much of the functionality of the Enterprise Edition without any licensing fees.
- A major problem we have had with Pentaho is their enterprise licensing. As a client who understands very well what is offered within the free Community Edition we felt their mark up on their enterprise features was much too high. They wanted to charge us for migrating from MySQL to Amazon RedShift since RedShift is an "analytical database" while nearly every other database could be connected to for free. Due to licensing concerns we terminated our enterprise license.
- Pentaho's visualization tools are very capable, but have a very steep learning curve and engineering cost. Due to this we ended switching from Pentaho for the majority of our internal dashboarding and reporting to purchasing Tableau licenses. If Pentaho could improve their visualization and dashboarding capabilities, they could truly be an end-to-end BI solution.
February 23, 2016
An implementor view on Pentaho tools.
- 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.
- Help documentation is an area for improvements. A lot of features and side effects just not documented.
- PDI uses swt. It has a lot of troubles with this dependency. It is run on Java, but with swt - and you are stuck with a platform that supports swt. ARM architecture does not have swt support out of the box.
- Online jobs/transformations creation. Jobs/transformations are just xml. So the lack of online editor is just 'it was not implemented yet'.
- Strange /Pentaho-solutions placement. Application is not deployed on a server in a standard way. Instead - a server should be embedded into a 'Pentaho solution' - very strange architecture.
February 16, 2016
One of the best BI solutions for start up companies or those looking for a highly customizable tool.
- automated reports
- dashboards
- data-integration
- Big Data
- Poor support
- few books published in relation to Pentaho
- Pentaho User Console could be more user friendly
August 19, 2015
Pentaho - Fast and Furious Data Integration
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Data Integration. PDI handles pretty much any type of data source and can transform data and conform it to any type of business logic.
- Object Oriented ETl Coding. Code developed in PDI can be shared across numerous jobs/transformations. This allows for resusable and maintainable code.
- Flexibility and plugins. If the function that you are looking for is not built into the tool, it's fairly straightforward to either download or develop plugins. There is a huge community of users that build new functionality all the time.
- Scaleable and cloud ready. PDI is able to cluster and scale out to handle huge data sets.
- The speed at which some trouble issues get resolved could be improved.
June 03, 2015
B.I. made simple. Pentaho rocks!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- The Data Integration tool is fantastic. A novice user can get up to speed quickly with it and the GUI is intuitive
- Support. As an enterprise customer, I am always thrilled with the fast turnaround on support tickets that I open.
- Job Scheduling. The Job scheduler is easy to use and very reliable
- Data Analyzer Tool in "User Console". The drag and drop UI makes it easy for me end users to see the data in whatever way suits them. They can even GEO-MAP the data instantly!!
- Speed on ETL. Without a very complex setup, the ETL Job runs single threaded and can be slow for BIG jobs.
- The "Report Designer" is decent, but lacks a lot of control that you might get from more mature products (like Business Objects, for instance). Sometimes to want to rotate or reformat a chart label, and it can't be done. In other cases, it can. It is not consistent. Also, 3D charts don't work in certain circumstances. Finally, charts mapped over time, in some cases, don't have the X Axis auto-scale and so all the data points are not readable.
March 16, 2015
Pentaho - Jumping On The Band Wagon
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- 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.
- Pentaho could use some improvement of the integration of ldap into the User Console. We have unsuccessfully been able to deploy the Pentaho User Console to partners because it does not support a federated ldap model. Even attempts at integrating to our primary ldap has proven fruitless.
- The Pentaho Suite as a whole tends to be a resource hog. Since we work with such large data sets we often find that large requests hang up or get an "oops error" which is a standard Pentaho error when the data set is too large. It would be nice to have some indication of our limits so that we are not guessing or we can limit the data set up front.
- Upgrades on the Suite are a bit cumbersome for our Administrators. There is not a standard backup and install package so upgrades often involve our administrator on the phone with Pentaho during the upgrades to walk through a custom install.
December 05, 2014
Data Integration with Pentaho Kettle review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Pentaho Kettle gives you a great graphic user interface to plan your transformation and jobs.
- Pentaho Kettle makes it easy to handle errors, logging and performance.
- Pentaho Kettle has dozen of great steps like: lookup and SCD functionality.
- Several steps have performance issues like the Json input.
- The community edition does not include scheduler and job manager so you need to figure it out yourself, unless of course you buy the Enterprise edition.
- I think that web service should be easier to operate.