Pentaho was just OK as an OEM solution
June 30, 2017

Pentaho was just OK as an OEM solution

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Pentaho

We made a decision to use Pentaho to OEM into the analytics feature of our software and the developers had a much harder time getting it integrated than we were expecting. The Mondrian code was hard to learn and the number of qualified applicants who already knew how to use it was limited.

  • 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.
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.
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.

Pentaho Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
2
Customizable dashboards
2
Report Formatting Templates
3
Drill-down analysis
6
Formatting capabilities
3
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
3
Publish to Web
5
Publish to PDF
5
Report Versioning
5
Report Delivery Scheduling
5
Delivery to Remote Servers
5
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
5
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
5
Predictive Analytics
5
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
Single Sign-On (SSO)
8
Responsive Design for Web Access
2
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
3
REST API
4
Javascript API
4
iFrames
2
Java API
4
Themeable User Interface (UI)
6
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
6