Adaptive Insights vs Pentaho Business Analytics comparison

Workday and Hitachi Vantara are both solutions in the Reporting category. Workday is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.2, while Hitachi Vantara is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.7. Workday holds a 0.5% mindshare in RT, compared to Hitachi Vantara’s 1.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Workday users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

Adaptive Insights

Read 18 Adaptive Insights reviews

339 Views
22 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Pentaho Business Analytics

Read 44 Pentaho Business Analytics reviews

662 Views
226 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Adaptive Insights

Pentaho Business Analytics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Pentaho Business Analytics and Adaptive Insights compete in the business analytics and financial planning category. Adaptive Insights seems to have the upper hand due to its ease of integration and focus on financial planning, making it more appealing for strategic data-driven decisions.

Features: Pentaho Business Analytics provides robust data integration capabilities, extensive reporting tools, and the flexibility to create customized analytical applications. Adaptive Insights offers financial planning, modeling, and forecasting through intuitive dashboards, a collaborative platform, and integration with various data sources.

Room for Improvement: Pentaho could improve its cloud deployment options, reduce setup complexity, and enhance user interface intuitiveness. Adaptive Insights may enhance its data operations capabilities, expand customization options, and streamline its integration processes to handle more extensive data requirements.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Adaptive Insights benefits from cloud-based deployment, enabling rapid implementation and lower maintenance, with strong customer support facilitating onboarding. Pentaho requires a more complex setup with on-premises infrastructure and offers less direct support.

Pricing and ROI: Pentaho incurs higher setup costs due to its extensive customization and infrastructure needs, offering substantial returns for in-depth data analysis. Adaptive Insights features a transparent pricing model with scalable options, appealing to organizations seeking quick ROI, particularly in financial planning.

To learn more, read our detailed Adaptive Insights vs. Pentaho Business Analytics Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights vs. Pentaho Business Analytics

June 2025

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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

Adaptive Insights

Ranking in Reporting

10th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Performance Management (8th), Financial Performance and Strategy Management (3rd), Data Visualization (11th), ESG Reporting Software (5th)

Pentaho Business Analytics

Ranking in Reporting

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (20th), Cloud Operations Analytics (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Adaptive Insights is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Business Analytics is 1.1%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting

Featured Reviews

Andrew Rosenberg

Adaptive Planning Manager at Alight

Adaptive scales well, simple to create new budget versions and models

For the organization I used to work at, it streamlined the process of creating budgets. It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday. So that made it easy. Reporting was pretty easy to set up as well. It streamlined the amount of time it took to do the budget as well as kind of making it simple to implement a rolling forecast process. So, it really was more just a productivity increase and time shortening for the budgeting and forecasting process.

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Mir Gulzar Ahmed

IT Manager at Synergy Computers

Excels in handling unstructured data, helping organizations navigate through different storage systems

Pentaho can help organizations by providing them an insight of their unstructured data using one platform(Pentaho Business Analytics). The features are almost identical to other BIS platforms but to me, customers can benefit as it has a community version with most of its Enterprise features. It also has a free limited-period trial version. The other feature that I would like to share here is, that users have access to a complete spectrum of data from different sources with the system’s adaptive big data layer, which takes the source of the data into account. The software is built on an open architecture and can be integrated with multiple systems. However, Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics has been acquired by HDS which offers an Enterprise edition for organizations that also need to meet product compliance.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Reports are allowed to be edited for aesthetic purposes, which is lacking in a lot of other dashboard tools."

"Forecasting changes that instantly flow through all financial statements."

"We utilize planning on a daily basis, therefore we find it to be the most valuable product for our organization."

"It helps develop a more unified work format throughout the company."

"It's very stable."

"The biggest feature is the source of truth for all of our budget and forecast versions."

"Automated reporting."

"The important feature is integration with source data. It connects to various ERP systems, including Workday, Intact, and others. It can also import actuals and compare them to PlanPoint quite easily."

More Adaptive Insights pros

"We were able to install it without any assistance from tech support."

"The most valuable feature of Pentaho is the Tableau report."

"The interface of Pentaho Business Analytics is easy to use and does not require high-level skills to operate the tool."

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."

"Easy to use components to create the job."

"Pentaho Business Analytics' best features include the ease of developing data flows and the wide range of options to connect to databases, including those on the cloud."

"It is robust, offers market intelligence, and utilizes modules effectively."

"Pentaho is an analytics platform that can be used when an organization has a lot of big data storage systems already installed and needs to manage and analyze that data. It has a specific use case for unstructured data, such as documents, and needs to be able to search and analyze it."

More Pentaho Business Analytics pros

Cons

"The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up."

"We tried Discovery and OfficeConnect at one point and found them too cumbersome, at the time."

"Users continue to become more advanced and are looking for more advanced solutions."

"Being able to drill down when using OfficeConnect needs work."

"Better user interface (UI)."

"Adaptive Insights has a limit of 1,00,000 rows for HTML reports. It should be improved because we will have multiple dimensions that need to be populated to enhance the image."

"Their customer support team is slow to respond and not extremely confident."

"The upload feature exists, but isn't terribly useful."

More Adaptive Insights cons

"Pentaho Business Analytics' user interface is outdated."

"We did not achieve the ROI. The work delivered to users had lesser value than the subscription cost."

"Another concern is that Pentaho is not customizable or interactive."

"The tool is very good, and yet it has some problems as it relies heavily on Java."

"Pentaho Business Analytics is hard to learn and not suited for initial users as it requires knowledge of operating systems, Java, and other technical skills."

"Deployment is not simple. It is not simple because we are dealing with a lot of data; we are dealing with a lot of storage. So, it's not a simple process."

"Logging capability is needed."

"Pentaho, at the general level, should greatly improve the easy construction of its dashboards and easy integration of information from different sources without technical user intervention."

More Pentaho Business Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Prior to purchasing licenses, make sure you understand which users will only need planning and which users will need both planning and OfficeConnect."

"Everything is negotiable, but this solution is low cost compared to others."

"Pricing is in line with other cloud-based EPM tools. It is a subscription-based model based upon the number of users and site type if it's an admin or end-user type thing."

"It's affordable."

"Ensure that you have the proper pricing plan in place."

"Licensing seems to be worth the cost considering the efficiency Adaptive brings."

"Adaptive Insights' pricing is relative to its peer competitors. It's certainly competitive compared to a spreadsheet template that you build in Excel. It can be expensive if you need to have 100-500 budget holders giving input and building financial plans. However, in that case, it becomes an extremely good bargain. Compared to its competitors, it offers an excellent value."

"Adaptive Insights' pricing is reasonable."

"Pentaho is expensive ."

"We were lucky enough to find a Pentaho OEM partner who offered a data warehouse model and the ETL software for about 60K SGD per year."

"Free and commercial versions are available."

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Comparison Review

it_user6978

Co-Founder at Helical IT Solution (Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Talend, Kettle, DWBI, ETL, Ctools, iReport, Jasper Report)

Jun 10, 2013

Jaspersoft vs. Pentaho – Which one to use & is there any need to purchase the commercial edition

Any company (be it technology, manfucaturing, human resource, ecommerce, SME etc) always has the need for Business Intelligence to some or the other extent. If cost is one of the consideration factor, then the 2 BI tools which are at the forefront are Pentaho and Jaspersoft. But, often the same…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Real Estate/Law Firm

10%

Legal Firm

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

Real Estate/Law Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Adaptive Insights?

It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Adaptive Insights?

12 years ago, it was very affordable. Workday has definitely increased its price since it acquired Adaptive a few years ago. So, it's affordable. But there are other more affordable solutions that ...

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What needs improvement with Adaptive Insights?

The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up. So, there could be room for just improving the integrations, making it easier to integrate outside sys...

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Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pentaho Business Analytics?

Pentaho Business Analytics is priced similarly to other competitors such as QlikView ( /products/qlikview-reviews ) and Tableau ( /products/tableau-reviews ). I usually use the community edition.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pentaho Business Analytics?

Pentaho Business Analytics ( /categories/bi-business-intelligence-tools ) is hard to learn and not suited for initial users as it requires knowledge of operating systems, Java, and other technical ...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights

June 2025

Download Adaptive Insights product report

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Business Analytics

May 2025

Download Pentaho Business Analytics product report

Also Known As

Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning

Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics

Overview

Adaptive Insights is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis software that helps businesses streamline their budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes.

With its intuitive interface and powerful analytics, it enables organizations to make data-driven decisions and drive business performance.

Workday

Pentaho is an open source business intelligence company that provides a wide range of tools to help their customers better manage their businesses. These tools include data integration software, mining tools, dashboard applications, online analytical processing options, and more.

Pentaho has two product categories: There is the standard enterprise version. This is the product that comes directly from Pentaho itself with all of the benefits, features, and programs that come along with a paid application such us analysis services, dashboard design, and interactive reporting.

The alternative is an open source version, which the public is permitted to add to and tweak the product. This solution has its advantages, aside from the fact that it is free, in that there are many more people working on the project to improve its quality and breadth of functionality.

Hitachi Vantara

Sample Customers

1. Cisco Systems 2. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated 3. Deloitte 4. DocuSign 5. Dropbox 6. Electronic Arts 7. Fender Musical Instruments Corporation 8. Fitbit 9. Fossil Group 10. Groupon 11. Hilton Worldwide 12. HP Inc. 13. Intuit 14. Johnson & Johnson 15. LinkedIn 16. Lyft 17. McAfee 18. Medtronic 19. Netflix 20. Oracle 21. Pandora 22. PayPal 23. Pinterest 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. ServiceNow 27. Slack Technologies 28. Spotify 29. Symantec 30. Tableau Software 31. Twitter 32. Workday

Cargo 2000 Lufthansa, Marketo, ModCloth, Cardiac Science, Telefonica, ExactTarget, Active Broadband Networks, and Brussels Airport.

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights vs. Pentaho Business Analytics

June 2025

Free Report: Adaptive Insights vs. Pentaho Business Analytics

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