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ETL Solutions Transformation Manager vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

 

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

ETL Solutions Transformatio...
Ranking in Data Integration
53rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Pentaho Data Integration an...
Ranking in Data Integration
9th
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 August 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of ETL Solutions Transformation Manager is 1.0%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.7%, down from 1.7% 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%
ETL Solutions Transformation Manager1.0%
Other97.3%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Vijayraj Amin - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Growth Strategist at MAIORA
User-friendly and accessible for anyone with computer knowledge and logical thinking
There is room for improvement in the solution's visualization tool. Currently, it provides basic reports and the ability to create graphs and dashboards, but I'm looking forward to more robust analytics. The plan is to enhance this feature in 2024, around Q2 or Q3, which would save us from relying on external tools like Power BI for insights.
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

"It is among the best, even if not widely known."
"Transformation Manager is the backbone of every data pipeline these days because the solution has been on the market for 20 to 30 years, and we use it for various industries, including financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, etc."
"Back in the day, we could only get reports and analyze what happened after the fact, but today now we can generate real-time insights. Transformation Manager feeds your data science projects. We generate models and then give them to the clients, so they can come up with real-time predictions and recommendations in addition to reporting."
"It is a reliable solution."
"Sometimes, it took a whole team about two weeks to get all the data to prepare and present it. After the optimization of the data, it took about one to two hours to do the whole process. Therefore, it has helped a lot when you talk about money, because it doesn't take a whole team to do it, just one person to do one project at a time and run it when you want to run it. So, it has helped a lot on that side."
"I would say this is the best ETL tool in the market, considering this is open source and ease to use, very nice GUI."
"I absolutely love Hitachi. I'm one of the forefront supporters of Hitachi for my firm. It's so easy to integrate within our environments. In terms of being able to quickly build ETL jobs, transform, and then automate them, it's really easy to integrate throughout for data analytics."
"The solution has a free to use community version."
"Pentaho Data Integration is easy to use, especially when transforming data."
"Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics has positively impacted my organization by saving costs, managing large data sets, and integrating multiple sources."
"We are very productive today thanks to that piece of software integration our data and the platform serving the processed data to our users."
"Lumada Data Integration definitely helps with decision-making for our deans and upper executives, and the fact that we're able to reuse some of the ETLs with the metadata injection saves us time and costs while making it a pretty quick process for our developers to learn and pick up ETLs from each other."
 

Cons

"We get decent support. It's okay but not great."
"Transformation Manager reporting could be better. There are better options for reporting tools these days. We use Microsoft BI sometimes, but Tableau is becoming too expensive. Microsoft BI's visualization features are maturing."
"They should build a functional architecture based on queuing."
"There is room for improvement in the solution's visualization tool."
"Although it is a low-code solution with a graphical interface, often the error messages that you get are of the type that a developer would be happy with. You get a big stack of red text and Java errors displayed on the screen, and less technical people can get intimidated by that. It can be a bit intimidating to get a wall of red error messages displayed. Other graphical tools that are focused at the power user level provide a much more user-friendly experience in dealing with your exceptions and guiding the user into where they've made the mistake."
"Overall, our Hitachi solution was quite good, but over the last couple of years, we have been trying to move away from the product due to a number of things."
"In terms of the flexibility to deploy in any environment, such as on-premise or in the cloud, we can do the cloud deployment only through virtual machines. We might also be able to work on different environments through Docker or Kubernetes, but we don't have an Azure app or an AWS app for easy deployment to the cloud. We can only do it through virtual machines, which is a problem, but we can manage it. We also work with Databricks because it works with Spark. We can work with clustered servers, and we can easily do the deployment in the cloud. With a right-click, we can deploy Databricks through the app on AWS or Azure cloud."
"I have been facing some difficulties when working with large datasets. It seems that when there is a large amount of data, I experience memory errors."
"​There is not a data quality or MDM solution in the Pentaho DI suite.​"
"I work with different databases. I would like to work with more connectors to new databases, e.g., DynamoDB and MariaDB, and new cloud solutions, e.g., AWS, Azure, and GCP. If they had these connectors, that would be great. They could improve by building new connectors. If you have native connections to different databases, then you can make instructions more efficient and in a more natural way. You don't have to write any scripts to use that connector."
"Lumada could have more native connectors with other vendors, such as Google BigQuery, Microsoft OneDrive, Jira systems, and Facebook or Instagram. We would like to gather data from modern platforms using Lumada, which is a better approach. As a comparison, if you open Power BI to retrieve data, then you can get data from many vendors with cloud-native connectors, such as Azure, AWS, Google BigQuery, and Athena Redshift. Lumada should have more native connectors to help us and facilitate our job in gathering information from these new modern infrastructures and tools."
"There some steps that should perform better like the json input, but because of the flexibility we at inflow, override it by using scripting steps."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive solution."
"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 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."
"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."
"For most development tasks, the Enterprise edition should be sufficient. It depends on the type of support that you require for your production environment."
"You need to go through the paid version to have Hitachi Lumada specialized support. However, if you are using the free version, then you will have only the community support. You will depend on the releases from Hitachi to solve some problem or questions that you have, such as bug fixes. You will need to wait for the newest versions or releases to solve these types of problems."
"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 price of the regular version is not reasonable and it should be lower."
"The pricing has been pretty good. I'm used to using everything open-source or freeware-based. I understand that organizations need to make sure that the solutions are secure, and that's basically where I hit a roadblock in my current organization. They needed to ensure that we had a license and we had a secure way of accessing it so that no outside parties could get access to our data, but in terms of pricing, considering how much other teams are spending on cloud solutions or even their existing solutions, its price point is pretty good. At this time, there are no additional costs. We just have the licensing fees."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
13%
Construction Company
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
Performing Arts
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
9%
Educational Organization
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

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

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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

Transformation Manager
Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Honda, BNP Paribas, RBS, JPMorgan, Volkswagen, Thorn Lighting, OpenSpirit, Rolls-Royce, Ulster Bank
66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Find out what your peers are saying about ETL Solutions Transformation Manager vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.