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Census vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Census
Ranking in Data Integration
38th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Pentaho Data Integration an...
Ranking in Data Integration
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Census is 0.5%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.6%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics1.6%
Census0.5%
Other97.9%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

JeanFrancois - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Accountant at Wells Fargo
Automation has transformed our data workflows and creates one trusted source across teams
Census offers excellent integration with popular tools including Salesforce. It can be set up easily and comes with great customer support. The easy setup stands out for me compared to other tools I have used because the support has been very helpful. I love their response time, as they are quick to resolve any issues that we have. Easy setup makes this tool much more user-friendly as it simplifies the process of synchronizing data between different systems. I also love the user interface, which is very easy to navigate and intuitive. This allows us to get up and running easily in minutes with little to no training. I appreciate that it is highly scalable and can integrate with various data warehouses like Redshift and S3, making it accessible to users without technical knowledge or engineers. Census has positively impacted my organization by being a great tool. We are able to respond to customers' account health more rapidly by synchronizing our data into the various customer account management tools. As mentioned, it is able to automate various tasks, enabling us to save a lot of time. It has also helped us minimize data silos while enabling the warehouse to be a single source of truth for data. Through automation, we have been able to save between forty and sixty percent in time and cost, thanks to the automation platform and automation capabilities.
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

"Through automation, we have been able to save between forty and sixty percent in time and cost, thanks to the automation platform and automation capabilities."
"Based on delivery metrics and team feedback, the benefit is that the time to activate new use cases was reduced from weeks to days, engineering effort dedicated to reverse ETL pipelines decreased by sixty to seventy percent, maintenance overhead for custom integration was almost completely eliminated, and marketing and growth teams accelerated experimentation cycles significantly."
"All you need is a balance of experienced users and new trainees to get going."
"Overall it is an awesome tool."
"We use Lumada’s ability to develop and deploy data pipeline templates once and reuse them. This is very important. When the entire pipeline is automated, we do not have any issues in respect to deployment of code or with code working in one environment but not working in another environment. We have saved a lot of time and effort from that perspective because it is easy to build ETL pipelines."
"When we get a question from our CEO that needs a response and that requires a little bit of legwork of pulling in from various market data, our own in-house repositories, and everything else, it allows me to arrive at the solutions much faster than having to do it through scripting in Python, coding, or anything else."
"When I started doing it and did the migration so that all that ETL process would be done in Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics, I reduced the processing time from two and a half hours per run to seven minutes."
"You can get ETL, reporting, analysis, and analytics in a single shop."
"You can get ETL, reporting, analysis, and analytics in a single shop."
"With this solution, instead of it taking a week, it was reduced to an afternoon, or about three hours."
 

Cons

"One area that may need improvement is that sometimes a custom setup is very difficult to configure."
"The areas for improvement are complex transformation logic because it must still be handled upstream in the warehouse, and cost predictability requires attention at high data volumes."
"As far as I remember, not all connectors worked very well."
"I was not happy with the Pentaho Report Designer because of the way it was set up."
"The product needs more plugins."
"Lumada could have more native connectors with other vendors, such as Google BigQuery, Microsoft OneDrive, Jira systems, and Facebook or Instagram."
"The performance could be improved. If they could have analytics perform well on large volumes, that would be a big deal for our products."
"Its UI is probably a bit too confusing for that level of user, so it doesn't allow us to get the tool as widely distributed across the organization to non-technical users as much as we would like."
"Some of the scheduling features about Lumada drive me buggy. The one issue that always drives me up the wall is when Daylight Savings Time changes. It doesn't take that into account elegantly. Every time it changes, I have to do something. It's not a big deal, but it's annoying."
"In the community version the scheduling tool is not good, and we had to build it ourselves."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"When we first started with it, it was much cheaper. It has gone up drastically, especially since Hitachi bought out Pentaho."
"I primarily work on the Community Version, which is available to use free of charge."
"The price of the regular version is not reasonable and it should be lower."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Sometimes we provide the licenses or the customer can procure their own licenses. Previously, we had an enterprise license. Currently, we are on a community license as this is adequate for our needs."
"We are using the Community Edition. We have been trying to use and sell the Enterprise version, but that hasn't been possible due to the budget required for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
11%
Educational Organization
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise31
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Census?
Census has been performing very well overall. One area that may need improvement is that sometimes a custom setup is very difficult to configure. This was the case with our Intercom segment setup. ...
What is your primary use case for Census?
Census is a versatile data synchronizing solution that solves a wide range of data management problems for our business. With Census, we were able to reduce the sync time taken to transfer data fro...
What advice do you have for others considering Census?
I would rate Census an eight out of ten according to my experience. I feel it is not quite a ten because sometimes a custom setup is very difficult to configure. This was the case with our Intercom...
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

No data available
Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
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