Pentaho- An adequate BI solution for users on a budget!
February 26, 2016
Pentaho- An adequate BI solution for users on a budget!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pentaho
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.
- 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
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.