Item: Pentaho
Rating: 8
Author: Rafael Grandizoli

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pentaho is used in my organization, mainly by the IT team, creating processes and routines focused on data ingestion from many sources. We also use Pentaho to create complex ETL jobs and prepare data to be used in our data warehouse and reporting platforms that are used by other departments in the company.

Pros and Cons

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

Return on Investment

Less time spent daily on exporting data from platforms (CSV, XLS, etc)
Prepare and enrich data from multiple sources
Automate report generation and schedule sending to clients or teams

Alternatives Considered

AWS Lambda

With Pentaho and its open-source community version, we could start showing the power of the data process and the purpose of a data lake and data warehouse project in the company, without the need for any program language skills in the team or a developer team.

Key Insights

Do you think Pentaho delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Pentaho's feature set?

Yes

Did Pentaho live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Pentaho go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Pentaho again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Zoho Analytics (formerly Zoho Reports), Tableau Public, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Usability

Even if Pentaho requires less technical skills to develop a pipeline or ETL project, its learning curve can be a bit slow since there are many ways to do the same thing as in any other platform. However, in Pentaho, some things can be confusing some moments for non-technical teams.

Support Rating

Pentaho is an amazing tool, having great flexibility and multiple purpose use, besides ETLs and data process, but it also has room to grow and modernize. The UI and key visuals had only a few updates over time, and the tecnology built could be improved and up to date.

Likelihood to Recommend

Pentaho requires less technical skills than other solutions to start integrating and creating complex data manipulations and preparation. By having logical skills you can just start to 'drag and drop' some boxes, connect them, and create a data pipeline, step by step.

Data integration made easy

Overall Satisfaction with Pentaho