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Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs dbt comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

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

dbt
Ranking in Data Integration
17th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Data Quality (6th)
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 dbt is 1.7%, up from 1.0% 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%
dbt1.7%
Other96.7%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Principal Data Engineer at Integrant, Inc.
Data teams have streamlined code-driven pipelines and now collaborate faster on shared models
We are still experimenting with testing, but not that much. We are not using some features yet. We are trying to introduce them because we are coming from a background of SSIS. The team used to work with SSIS, Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services. We are still adapting one feature at a time. Currently, we are working with the SQL modules and with the Jinja templating. We are experimenting with testing, but I would say towards the end of this year, we are planning to explore more of the documentation and the data lineage options as well. I would say the benefits are coming from GUI-based tools like SSIS. We have more control on the codebase. We can create something of a system where we can use macros and templating, speeding up the development cycle. We are now trying to introduce a little testing, and also we are using some sort of a CI/CD cycle, so continuous integration and continuous deployment. I do not believe that these kinds of features are that common as a package as a whole package. dbt excels in that area. I used to have a couple of notes about the performance, but lately I have discovered something called dbt Fusion, which, according to dbt Labs, they proclaim is much faster during the parsing of dbt models. However, I would love to see even more of an out-of-the-box solution regarding the testing. They are treating the testing in a good way so far, but I would love to see even more improvement because the whole data testing field is not very mature. It is not the same as software testing; for example, you have test suites, test tools, and profilers, but for data testing, it is not yet that advanced. I would love for dbt to take the lead on that.
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

"I would say the best feature or the most desirable feature for dbt is the ability to write everything in code."
"There is operational efficiency achieved, and data quality and governance have also been achieved with modular SQL and version controlling, which reduced duplication of data and data errors."
"dbt has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to create our data pipelines much faster, going from ingestion of data to creating a data product in weeks instead of months, and we can do it in-house with the skillset we already have."
"From a developer point of view, I find the ease of development and the code to be the most useful capabilities of dbt."
"The product is developer-friendly."
"Since we migrated from SSIS to dbt model architecture, it takes around four hours only to complete a full refresh, and the client is now happy because our downtime was drastically reduced when we perform a complete refresh of the data."
"If we didn't have this solution, we wouldn't be able to manage our workload or generate the volume of reporting that we currently do."
"We're using the PDI and the repository function, and they give us the ability to easily generate reporting and output, and to access data. We also like the ability to schedule."
"No software can give as complete functionality for fulfilling end user requirements as Pentaho."
"It makes it pretty simple to do some fairly complicated things. Both I and some of our other BI developers have made stabs at using, for example, SQL Server Integration Services, and we found them a little bit frustrating compared to Data Integration. So, its ease of use is right up there."
"Anyone thinking about an ETL product, if they want high productivity on data cleaning and data movement, Pentaho Data Integration, in my opinion, is the best tool."
"We also haven't had to create any custom Java code. Almost everywhere it's SQL, so it's done in the pipeline and the configuration. That means you can offload the work to people who, while they are not less experienced, are less technical when it comes to logic."
"It has improved our data integration capabilities​."
"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."
 

Cons

"dbt can be improved as I find the co-pilot in dbt is not very good, and my team has tried using it but opted to move off it and use other co-pilots such as GitHub."
"If I needed to name a few areas for improvement, I would mention the migration of code to Git and GitHub, which sometimes fails and can be confusing for developers during handover."
"Every upgrade is a little bit of a risk for us because we do not know if the workarounds that we developed will be available for the next version."
"Since dbt has a license cost, if a company is small and does not have much budget, they can explore other tools because there are other tools that provide the same functionality at a lower cost."
"Dbt is not as stable as preferred, as it has had a few outages in the current year itself, so improvement should be made in the outages section as it is not stable."
"The solution must add more Python-based implementations."
"Since Hitachi took over, I don't feel that the documentation is as good within the solution."
"Should provide additional control for the data warehouse"
"While Pentaho Data Integration is very friendly, it is not very useful when there isn't a lot of data to handle."
"One thing that I don't like, just a little, is the backward compatibility."
"Its basic functionality doesn't need a whole lot of change. There could be some improvement in the consistency of the behavior of different transformation steps. The software did start as open-source and a lot of the fundamental, everyday transformation steps that you use when building ETL jobs were developed by different people. It is not a seamless paradigm. A table input step has a different way of thinking than a data merge step."
"In the Community edition, it would be nice to have more modules that allow you to code directly within the application. It could have R or Python completely integrated into it, but this could also be because I'm using an older version."
"If you're working with a larger data set, I'm not so sure it would be the best solution; the larger things got the slower it was and it was kind of buggy sometimes."
"The product needs more plugins."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution’s pricing is affordable."
"I use it because it is free. I download from their page for free. I don't have to pay for a license. With other tools, I have to pay for the licenses. That is why I use Pentaho."
"I mostly used the open-source version. I didn't work with a license."
"There is a good open source option (Community Edition)​."
"I primarily work on the Community Version, which is available to use free of charge."
"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"
"I think Lumada's price is fair compared to some of the others, like BusinessObjects, which is was the other thing that I used at my previous job. BusinessObject's price was more reasonable before SAP acquired it. They jacked the price up significantly. Oracle's OBIEE tool was also prohibitively expensive."
"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."
"For most development tasks, the Enterprise edition should be sufficient. It depends on the type of support that you require for your production environment."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Insurance Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Educational Organization
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise31
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for dbt?
The course content that dbt provides is free and excellent for anyone starting out.
What needs improvement with dbt?
We are still experimenting with testing, but not that much. We are not using some features yet. We are trying to introduce them because we are coming from a background of SSIS. The team used to wor...
What is your primary use case for dbt?
I am working with one of our enterprise customers, managing their newly established cloud warehouse. They are using Snowflake and we are using dbt to manage all the transformation and views and tab...
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs. dbt and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.