A great tool, but falls under the shadow of the larger players.
June 28, 2018
A great tool, but falls under the shadow of the larger players.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Pentaho
We rolled out Pentaho within one of our business units as a way to get at trapped data from an old home-grown CRM system that had been recently updated to .net. Pentaho quickly got us access to the data and the built-in ETL tools were easy and quick to use and learn. It enabled a team of two to provide enough data, reporting and analytical dashboards to support over $1.5B in sales.
- 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.
Pentaho ranks #3 out of the four. I would always choose Qlik Sense overall since it is so incredibly fast and adaptable. It also has built-in ETL and has a much greater community. If you don't like Qlik, Tableau would be a second choice but the company is difficult to work with. Power BI would be last, it looks cool on the surface, but you need an army of low-level analysts to crank out tabular models to feet it, so the TCO is way out of line with other solutions.