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Ab Initio Co>Operating System vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Ab Initio Co>Operating System
Ranking in Data Integration
29th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (20th)
Pentaho Data Integration an...
Ranking in Data Integration
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Ab Initio Co>Operating System is 1.1%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.7%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics1.7%
Ab Initio Co>Operating System1.1%
Other97.2%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2777331 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Analyst at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Metadata-driven lineage has transformed our data governance and delivers flexible integration
While Ab Initio Co>Operating System has positive attributes, I find that certain features can sometimes be difficult to understand. When I have too many import feeds opened, they can conflict with each other. If I'm using two separate import feeds for running my codes and they contain the same code inside, they experience conflicts, which creates difficulties. I believe this should not occur because it requires me to clear the work queue to run my import feed. I don't believe there are any missing features in Ab Initio Co>Operating System so far, but I would appreciate a better search feature. The global search is excellent, but a more in-depth search feature that allows me to search within the feeds or assets would be beneficial.
Michelle Lawson - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Streamlines complex data workflows and has supported automated customer payment notifications
I haven't used Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics in a couple of years, so I don't know how it can be improved. I was pretty pleased with it and was self-taught on it, working a lot with their team at various times, but they were surprised that I was able to learn it all by myself. The documentation is not bad, and documentation is the main thing that any product can do to make themselves better because the easier it is to find examples of what you're trying to do improves the learning curve. I think it took me the longest to learn how to do the asynchronous processing and have things wait for other things to finish processing before continuing on in the workflow. I choose 8 out of 10 because the one reason that it's been rejected at T-Mobile is that everything has to go through a provisioning process and has to get approved, meaning the actual code base has to be investigated by T-Mobile before they'll allow us to use tools of that nature. For whatever reason, we just haven't been able to get that approval; I don't know if it's on Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics' side or if it's on our side. The more you can make it easier for companies to feel comfortable that your product is secure, robustly tested and bug-free, and free of any other kind of negative hacks, the more quickly it will get accepted.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The graphical interface of Ab Initio Co>Operating System is very easy to understand and allows me to visualize the data flow effectively."
"Co>Operating System's most valuable feature is its ability to process bulk data effectively."
"Ab Initio Co>Operating System support is the best I have encountered."
"Ab Initio reaches the highest performance and is very flexible in processing huge amounts of data."
"Ab Initio Co>Operating System excels at providing data lineage regardless of the type of data I have."
"The fact that it's a low-code solution is valuable. It's good for more junior people who may not be as experienced with programming."
"The speed of developing solutions has been the best improvement, reducing development time by days or weeks compared to using a different tool."
"We have a huge amount of data that needs to be cleaned and made more valuable for our organization, and this Data Integration helps us to achieve that goal."
"This solution allows us to create pipelines using a minimal amount of custom coding."
"Using the solution we were able to reduce our ETL deployment time by between 10 and 20 percent, and when it comes to personnel costs, we have gained 10 percent."
"The fact that it enables us to leverage metadata to automate data pipeline templates and reuse them is definitely one of the features that we like the best. The metadata injection is helpful because it reduces the need to create and maintain additional ETLs. If we didn't have that feature, we would have lots of duplicated ETLs that we would have to create and maintain. The data pipeline templates have definitely been helpful when looking at productivity and costs."
"From my perspective I don't see the difference, we can do almost everything with Pentaho Kettle and if we need a little extra we are tech guys, we solve it."
"I find the drag and drop feature in Pentaho Data Integration very useful for integration."
 

Cons

"Co>Operating System would be improved with more integrations for less well-known technologies."
"Ab Initio Co>Operating System is a very expensive product."
"Ab Initio Co>Operating System is a costly technology."
"An awesome improvement would be big data solutions, for example, implementing some kind of business intelligence or neural networks for artificial intelligence."
"While Ab Initio Co>Operating System has positive attributes, I find that certain features can sometimes be difficult to understand."
"It's not very stable, at least not in the case of the community edition. I'm working with the community edition right now and I think perhaps it is because of that it is not very stable, it causes the system to sometimes hang. I'm not sure if this is the case for pair tiers."
"I also found, in my case, that the statistical data input wasn't working (.sas7bdat input wasn't working)."
"The initial version we were on was v3.2 and we had multiple issues, but currently don't find any issues as a blocker."
"I was not happy with the Pentaho Report Designer because of the way it was set up. There was a zone and, under it, another zone, and under that another one, and under that another one. There were a lot of levels and places inside the report, and it was a little bit complicated. You have to search all these different places using a mouse, clicking everywhere... each report is coded in a binary file... You cannot search with a text search tool..."
"When dealing with substantial data volumes from cloud systems, performance can become an issue; even using the Enterprise Edition, the time required for executing particular pipeline tasks is notably high compared to other ETL tools such as ADF, DataBricks, or SSIS."
"Support for common Hadoop utilities can be expanded, such as bulk load with composite row keys for HBase, and include drivers for Impala out-of-the-box."
"The product needs more plugins."
"I'm still in the very recent stage concerning Pentaho Data Integration, but it can't really handle what I describe as "extreme data processing" i.e. when there is a huge amount of data to process. That is one area where Pentaho is still lacking."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Co>Operating System's pricing is on the expensive end since it tends to be used by big enterprises."
"When we first started with it, it was much cheaper. It has gone up drastically, especially since Hitachi bought out Pentaho."
"It does seem a bit expensive compared to the serverless product offering. Tools, such as Server Integration Services, are "almost" free with a database engine. It is comparable to products like Alteryx, which is also very expensive."
"We did a two or three-year deal the last time we did it. As compared to other solutions, at least so far in our experience, it has been very affordable. The licensing is by component. So, you need to make sure you only license the components that you really intend to use. I am not sure if we have relicensed after the Hitachi acquisition, but previously, multi-year renewals resulted in a good discount. I'm not sure if this is still the case. We've had the full suite for a lot of years, and there is just the initial cost. I am not aware of any additional costs."
"I believe the pricing of the solution is more affordable than the competitors"
"If a company is looking for an ETL solution and wants to integrate it with their tech stack but doesn't want to spend a bunch of money, Pentaho is a good solution"
"The solution reduced our ETL development time by a lot because a whole project used to take about a month to get done previously. After having Lumada, it took just a week. For a big company in Brazil, it saves a team at least $10,000 a month."
"The cost of these types of solutions are expensive. So, we really appreciate what we get for our money. Though, we don't think of the solution as a top-of-the-line solution or anything like that."
"There was a cost analysis done and Pentaho did favorably in terms of cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
8%
Educational Organization
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise32
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Ab Initio Co>Operating System?
While Ab Initio Co>Operating System has positive attributes, I find that certain features can sometimes be difficult to understand. When I have too many import feeds opened, they can conflict wi...
What is your primary use case for Ab Initio Co>Operating System?
The flexibility of data type and source integration for my IT ecosystem is excellent because Ab Initio Co>Operating System uses metadata, so it doesn't actually access the data; it takes the dat...
What advice do you have for others considering Ab Initio Co>Operating System?
I have not been involved in the security access of the platform's data security features, but I know that Ab Initio Co>Operating System is very careful because it doesn't access any customer dat...
Which ETL tool would you recommend to populate data from OLTP to OLAP?
Hi Rajneesh, yes here is the feature comparison between the community and enterprise edition : https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/pdf/brochure/leverage-open-source-benefits-with-assurance-of-hita...
What do you think can be improved with Hitachi Lumada Data Integrations?
In my opinion, the reporting side of this tool needs serious improvements. In my previous company, we worked with Hitachi Lumada Data Integration and while it does a good job for what it’s worth, ...
What do you use Hitachi Lumada Data Integrations for most frequently?
My company has used this product to transform data from databases, CSV files, and flat files. It really does a good job. We were most satisfied with the results in terms of how many people could us...
 

Also Known As

Co>Operating System
Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

A multinational transportation company
66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Find out what your peers are saying about Ab Initio Co>Operating System vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.