IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

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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

IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Ranking in Data Integration

26th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Virtualization (3rd)

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Ranking in Data Integration

18th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of IBM Cloud Pak for Data is 1.8%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.7%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Integration Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics	1.7%
IBM Cloud Pak for Data	1.8%
Other	96.5%

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Michelle Leslie

Data asset management engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

Starts strong with data management capabilities but needs a demo database

What I would love to see is an end-to-end, almost a training demo database of some sort, where one of the biggest problems with data management is demonstrated. There are so many components to data management, and more often than not, people understand one thing really well. They may understand DataStage and how to move data around, but they do not see the impact of moving data incorrectly. They also do not see the impact of everyone understanding a piece of data in the same way. I would love Cloud Pak to come with a demo database that illustrates the different components of data management in a logical way, so I can see the whole picture instead of just the area I'm specializing in. It would be great if Cloud Pak, from a data modeling point of view, allowed us to import our PDMs, for example. It would be ideal to import and create business terms in Cloud Pak. The PEA would be great to create the technical data. The association between the business and the technical metadata could then be automated by pulling it through from your ACE models. The data modeling component is available in Cloud Pak. Additionally, when it comes to Cloud Pak, even though it has the NextGen DataStage built into it, there is Cloud Pak for data integration as well. Currently, I do not think we have a full enough understanding of how CP4D and CP4I can enhance each other.

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Aqeel UR Rehman

BI Analyst at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Transform data efficiently with rich features but there's challenges with large datasets

Currently, I am using Pentaho Data Integration for transforming data and then loading it into different platforms. Sometimes, I use it in conjunction with AWS, particularly S3 and Redshift, to execute the copy command for data processing Pentaho Data Integration is easy to use, especially when…

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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

"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine or ten out of ten."

"You can model the data there, connect the data models with the business processes and create data lineage processes."

"DataStage allows me to connect to different data sources."

"One of Cloud Pak's best features is the Watson Knowledge Catalog, which helps you implement data governance."

"What I found most helpful in IBM Cloud Pak for Data is containerization, which means it's easy to shift and leave in terms of moving to other clouds. That's an advantage of IBM Cloud Pak for Data."

"The most valuable features of IBM Cloud Pak for Data are the Watson Studio, where we can initiate more groups and write code. Additionally, Watson Machine Learning is available with many other services, such as APIs which you can plug the machine learning models."

"Its data preparation capabilities are highly valuable."

"Cloud Pak is a very, very, very good system."

More IBM Cloud Pak for Data pros

"It has a really friendly user interface, which is its main feature. The process of automating or combining SQL code with some databases and doing the automation is great and really convenient."

"The area where Lumada has helped us is in the commercial area. There are many extractions to compose reports about our sales team performance and production steps. Since we are using Lumada to gather data from each industry in each country. We can get data from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Colombia at the same time. We can then concentrate and consolidate it in only one place, like our data warehouse. This improves our production performance and need for information about the industry, production data, and commercial data."

"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."

"The abstraction is quite good."

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

"It's my understanding that the product can scale."

"One of the valuable features is the ability to use PL/SQL statements inside the data transformations and jobs."

"It has improved our data integration capabilities."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pros

Cons

"The solution's user experience is an area that has room for improvement."

"One thing that bugs me is how much infrastructure Cloud Pak requires for the initial deployment. It doesn't allow you to start small. The smallest permitted deployment is too big. It's a huge problem that prevents us from implementing the solution in many scenarios."

"The product is trying to be more maturity in terms of connectors. That, I believe, is an area where Cloud Pak can improve."

"There is a solution that is part of IBM Cloud Pak for Data called Watson OpenScale. It is used to monitor the deployed models for the quality and fairness of the results. This is one area that needs a lot of improvement."

"The interface could improve because sometimes it becomes slow. Sometimes there is a delay between clicks when using the software, which can make the development process slow. It can take a few seconds to complete one action, and then a few more seconds to do the next one."

"What I would love to see is an end-to-end, almost a training demo database of some sort, where one of the biggest problems with data management is demonstrated."

"The tool depends on the control plane, an OpenShift container platform utilized as an orchestration layer...So, we have communicated this issue to IBM and asked if it is feasible to adapt the solution to work on a Kubernetes platform that we support."

"The solution could have more connectors."

More IBM Cloud Pak for Data cons

"Communicating with the vendor is challenging, and this hinders its performance in free tool setups."

"I would like to see improvements made for real-time data processing."

"Should provide additional control for the data warehouse"

"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."

"I would like to see more improvements with AS400 DB2."

"I could not connect to our Hadoop environment in an easy and flexible way, and it was important to scale our data warehouse."

"The web interface is rusty, and the biggest problem with Pentaho is debugging and troubleshooting. It isn't easy to build the pipeline incrementally. At least in our case, it's hard to find a way to execute step by step in the debugging mode."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is competitive with that of other vendors."

"I don't have the exact licensing cost for IBM Cloud Pak for Data, as my company is still finalizing requirements, including monthly, yearly, and three-year licensing fees. Still, on a scale of one to five, I'd rate it a three because, compared to other vendors, it's more complicated."

"IBM Cloud Pak for Data is expensive. If we include the training time and the machine learning, it's expensive. The cost of the execution is more reasonable."

"It's quite expensive."

"Cloud Pak's cost is a little high."

"The solution is expensive."

"For the licensing of the solution, there is a yearly payment that needs to be made. Also, since it is expensive, cost-wise, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten."

"I think that this product is too expensive for smaller companies."

"I believe the pricing of the solution is more affordable than the competitors"

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

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

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

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	16
Large Enterprise	25

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Cloud Pak for Data?

The setup cost is very expensive. The cost depends on the pieces of the solution I'm using, how much data I have, and whether it's on the cloud or on-prem.

What needs improvement with IBM Cloud Pak for Data?

What is your primary use case for IBM Cloud Pak for Data?

My primary use case for Cloud Pak is that I am the reference Data steward for the Africa regions in the banks where I work. My main objective is to capture the reference data in Caltech or Data and...

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...

IBM InfoSphere DataStage vs IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Comparisons

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Denodo vs IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Compared 13% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Compared 11% of the time

Palantir Foundry vs IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Compared 8% of the time

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Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 14% of the time

Informatica PowerCenter vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 10% of the time

SSIS vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 9% of the time

SnapLogic vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 9% of the time

Talend Open Studio vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 8% of the time

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Download IBM Cloud Pak for Data product report

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Download Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics product report

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics report

Also Known As

Cloud Pak for Data

Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration

Overview

IBM Cloud Pak® for Data is a fully-integrated data and AI platform that modernizes how businesses collect, organize and analyze data to infuse AI throughout their organizations. Cloud-native by design, the platform unifies market-leading services spanning the entire analytics lifecycle. From data management, DataOps, governance, business analytics and automated AI, IBM Cloud Pak for Data helps eliminate the need for costly, and often competing, point solutions while providing the information architecture you need to implement AI successfully.

Building on the streamlined hybrid-cloud foundation of Red Hat® OpenShift®, IBM Cloud Pak for Data takes advantage of the underlying resource and infrastructure optimization and management. The solution fully supports multicloud environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud™ and private cloud deployments. Find out how IBM Cloud Pak for Data can lower your total cost of ownership and accelerate innovation.

IBM

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

Qatar Development Bank, GuideWell, Skanderborg Music Festival

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

IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics