FME vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

Safe Software and Hitachi Vantara are both solutions in the Data Integration category. Safe Software is ranked #26 with an average rating of 8.7, while Hitachi Vantara is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.7. Safe Software holds a 1.8% mindshare in DI, compared to Hitachi Vantara’s 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Safe Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

FME

Read 5 FME reviews

2,503 Views
1,829 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Read 53 Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics reviews

2,102 Views
1,065 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

FME

Pentaho Data Integration an...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Pentaho Data Integration and FME compete in data integration and transformation categories. Pentaho generally has an advantage with its pricing and customer support, while FME's feature set aligns with its premium pricing.

Features: Pentaho provides capabilities like data blending, reporting, and OLAP services, making it suitable for comprehensive data analytics. FME excels in spatial data processing, providing robust integration with geographic formats.

Room for Improvement: Pentaho could benefit from enhancing its spatial data handling capabilities, expanding its free version features, and improving its UI for more intuitive use. FME might improve by offering more flexible pricing options, simplifying its learning curve for non-technical users, and expanding its customer service options beyond self-support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pentaho features a flexible deployment that integrates easily with existing systems and offers supportive customer service for troubleshooting. FME's deployment is streamlined, particularly for geographic systems, but leans on self-service support.

Pricing and ROI: Pentaho is more affordable, offering strong ROI for extensive data integration on a budget, appealing to small to medium enterprises with cost-effective licensing. FME, despite its higher cost, delivers substantial ROI for industries with complex spatial data needs, justifying its premium through advanced features and integration options.

To learn more, read our detailed FME vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

FME vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

April 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

FME

Ranking in Data Integration

26th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Ranking in Data Integration

22nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of FME is 1.8%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Alan Bloor

Geographic Information System Developer at Public Sector

Great for handling large volumes of data, but it is priced a bit high

When I do coding, I think about every single function. Some of these functions can be very elementary, like doing a substring or some capitalization. But FME removes all that coding because it's a transformer, so the time to develop an application to get to a point where you're producing results is decreased massively. It used to take weeks and months to develop software, and now I can use something like FME, and within one day, we get results. We can look at and validate data. We make minor subtle changes to the workbenches to improve it. We can share the workbenches. We don't have to use GitHub or anything else.

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Ryan Ferdon

Senior Data Engineer at Burgiss

Low-code makes development faster than with Python, but there were caching issues

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. It was kind of buggy sometimes. And when we ran the flow, it didn't go from a perceived start to end, node by node. Everything kicked off at once. That meant there were times when it would get ahead of itself and a job would fail. That was not because the job was wrong, but because Pentaho decided to go at everything at once, and something would process before it was supposed to. There were nodes you could add to make sure that, before this node kicks off, all these others have processed, but it was a bit tedious. There were also caching issues, and we had to write code to clear the cache every time we opened the program, because the cache would fill up and it wouldn't run. I don't know how hard that would be for them to fix, or if it was fixed in version 10. Also, the UI is a bit outdated, but I'm more of a fan of function over how something looks. One other thing that would have helped with Pentaho was documentation and support on the internet: how to do things, how to set up. I think there are some sites on how to install it, and Pentaho does have a help repository, but it wasn't always the most useful.

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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

"The most valuable feature of FME is the graphical user interface. There is nothing better. It is very easy to debug because you can see all steps where there are failures. Overall the software is easy to optimize a process."

"All spatial features are unrivaled, and the possibility to execute them based on a scheduled trigger, manual, e-mail, Websocket, tweet, file/directory change or virtually any trigger is most valuable."

"We make minor subtle changes to the workbenches to improve it. We can share the workbenches. We don't have to use GitHub or anything else."

"It has a very friendly user interface. You don't need to use a lot of code. For us that's the most important aspect about it. Also, it has a lot of connectors and few forms. It has a strong facial aspect. It can do a lot of facial analysis."

"It has standard plug-ins available for different data sources."

"The solution offers features for data integration and migration. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics allows the integration of multiple data sources into one. The product is user-friendly and intuitive to use for almost any business."

"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's very simple compared to other products out there."

"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."

"This solution allows us to create pipelines using a minimal amount of custom coding."

"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."

"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 find the drag and drop feature in Pentaho Data Integration very useful for integration."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pros

Cons

"FME can improve the geographical transformation. I've had some problems with the geographical transformations, but it's probably mostly because I'm not the most skilled geographer in-house. The solution requires some in-depth knowledge to perform some functions."

"FME's price needs improvement for the African market."

"To get a higher rating, it would have to improve the price and the associated scalability. These are the main issues."

"Improvements could be made to mapping presentations."

"The one thing that always appears in the community is the ability to make really easy loops to loop through data efficiently. That needs to be added at some point."

"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."

"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."

"The performance could be improved. If they could have analytics perform well on large volumes, that would be a big deal for our products."

"There is not a data quality or MDM solution in the Pentaho DI suite."

"I would like to see support for some additional cloud sources. It doesn't support Azure, for example. I was trying to do a PoC with Azure the other day but it seems they don't support it."

"I experience difficulties when handling millions of rows, as the data movement from one source to another becomes challenging."

"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..."

"Parallel execution could be better in Pentaho. It's very simple but I don't think it works well."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We used the standard licensing for our use of FME. The cost was approximately €15,000 annually. We always welcome less expensive solutions, if the solution could be less expensive it would be helpful."

"The product's price is reasonable."

"FME Server used to cost £10,000; now it can cost over £100,000."

"I mostly used the open-source version. I didn't work with a license."

"There was a cost analysis done and Pentaho did favorably in terms of cost."

"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."

"When we first started with it, it was much cheaper. It has gone up drastically, especially since Hitachi bought out Pentaho."

"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."

"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 primarily work on the Community Version, which is available to use free of charge."

"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."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

30%

Energy/Utilities Company

14%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about FME?

We make minor subtle changes to the workbenches to improve it. We can share the workbenches. We don't have to use GitHub or anything else.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FME?

The pricing is really bad. Last year, they rebranded the whole pricing structure. It used to be moderately priced at about £400 per user per year. Now they've changed the whole thing, and it's expe...

See all answers

What needs improvement with FME?

The one thing that always appears in the community is the ability to make really easy loops to loop through data efficiently. That needs to be added at some point. There must be a technical or comm...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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, ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

FME

April 2025

Download FME product report

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

April 2025

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics report

Download Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics product report

Also Known As

No data available

Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration

Overview

FME is the data integration platform with the best support for spatial data. Run workflows on the desktop or deploy them in a server or cloud environment.

Safe Software

Pentaho Data Integration stands as a versatile platform designed to cater to the data integration and analytics needs of organizations, regardless of their size. This powerful solution is the go-to choice for businesses seeking to seamlessly integrate data from diverse sources, including databases, files, and applications. Pentaho Data Integration facilitates the essential tasks of cleaning and transforming data, ensuring it's primed for meaningful analysis. With a wide array of tools for data mining, machine learning, and statistical analysis, Pentaho Data Integration empowers organizations to glean valuable insights from their data. What sets Pentaho Data Integration apart is its maturity and a vibrant community of users and developers, making it a reliable and cost-effective option. Pentaho Data Integration offers a range of features, including a comprehensive ETL toolkit, data cleaning and transformation capabilities, robust data analysis tools, and seamless deployment options for data integration and analytics solutions, making it a go-to solution for organizations seeking to harness the power of their data.

Hitachi Vantara

Sample Customers

Shell, US Department of Commerce, PG&E, BC Hydro, City of Vancouver, Enel, Iowa DoT, San Antonio Water System

66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute

Buyer's Guide

FME vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

April 2025

Free Report: FME vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

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