Pentaho - Yay or Nay?
November 04, 2016

Pentaho - Yay or Nay?

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pentaho

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.
  • 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
  • Good client feedback - caters to specific requirements
  • Low learning curve for new staff
  • Good community backup
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.
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 Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
4
Customizable dashboards
7
Report Formatting Templates
7
Drill-down analysis
6
Formatting capabilities
5
Integration with R or other statistical packages
5
Report sharing and collaboration
4
Publish to Web
6
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
8
Report Delivery Scheduling
7
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
7
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
7
Predictive Analytics
6
Multi-User Support (named login)
2
Role-Based Security Model
5
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
6
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated