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IBM InfoSphere Information Server 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

IBM InfoSphere Information ...
Ranking in Data Integration
34th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Metadata Management (7th)
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 July 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of IBM InfoSphere Information Server is 0.9%, up from 0.8% 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%
IBM InfoSphere Information Server0.9%
Other97.4%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

MI
Senior Data Engineer at Mohammed Mansour Alrumiah
Faced challenges with customer support and documentation but have benefited from reliable data integration over the years
As for utilizing the platform's metadata management feature, I have not worked on that feature yet, but personally, I have done that. To evaluate the effectiveness of IBM InfoSphere Information Server's data integration capabilities, if IBM is providing all the solutions we are using, then it is definitely a helpful thing. Mostly, the other thing is that it is a big area including data governance, data lineage, data management, and metadata, but every customer is not putting that much effort and money on that. They mostly migrate the data, use it, and forget it, but slowly things are changing. I am working in Saudi Arabia, so here also data governance, data management, and those kinds of things are getting attention. Regarding how scalable IBM InfoSphere Information Server is, I need to learn how to tune performance and scalability on the cloud. I am familiar with localized hardware, but on the cloud, I still have to do the work around it. In the beginning, we estimate the load and based on that, we put the hardware, but if there is continuous increase, I believe IBM also faces problems. Scalability needs to be improved because once the demand comes, you should be able to improve it, but for that, documentation on how to add hardware or resources to the software needs to be proper. I do not have much hands-on experience with 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

"Data connections, data partitioning, flexibility, and performance are the most valuable features."
"This solution has reduced the time it takes for ETL. We took an existing Teradata ETL application from three days to eight minutes."
"This solution is extremely flexible and scalable."
"Reduces the loading and development time for Datawarehouse ETL."
"Deploying the solution is straightforward for me."
"The initial IBM InfoSphere Information Server is straightforward and you can choose what type of installation you want, such as a customized installation, with clear-cut documentation that, if followed, works fine and the installation has not given us issues."
"Over the years of working with IBM InfoSphere Information Server, I see basically the strength of the tool, capability, and load balancing, which I see is really good."
"IBM InfoSphere Information Server is stable."
"It is easy to use, install, and start working with."
"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."
"The product is user-friendly and intuitive"
"The way it has improved our product is by giving our users the ability to do ad hoc reports, which is very important to our users. We can do predictive analysis on trends coming in for contracts, which is what our product does. The product helps users decide which way to go based on the predictive analysis done by Pentaho. Pentaho is not doing predictions, but reporting on the predictions that our product is doing. This is a big part of our product."
"Running itself with the ETL was very fast; it makes it so that it is very easy to transform the information we have, and we found that very useful."
"Before we used Pentaho, our processes were in Microsoft Excel and the updates from databases had to be done manually, but now all our routines are done automatically and we have more time to do other jobs, saving us four or five hours daily."
"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."
"Pentaho Data Integration is quite simple to learn, and there is a lot of information available online."
 

Cons

"Unlike other tools, IBM tools do not provide much help from the internet, so additional support should be available."
"This solution would benefit from the engine being made more lightweight."
"Their technical support needs improvement."
"IBM InfoSphere Information Server should be more scalable. It should have the option to change the configuration to run on a single, non-multiple node, or multi-threading processing."
"We have decided to decrease the usage of metadata management because we did not see any significant advantages."
"Heavy use of scratch disk which sometimes leads to failure."
"Customer Service: It's poor."
"There are certain shortcomings in the cloud side of the solution, where improvements are required."
"The testing and quality could really improve. Every time that there is a major release, we are very nervous about what is going to get broken. We have had a lot of experience with that, as even the latest one was broken. Some basic things get broken. That doesn't look good for Hitachi at all. If there is one place I would advise them to spend some money and do some effort, it is with the quality. It is not that hard to start putting in some unit tests so basic things don't get broken when they do a new release. That just looks horrible, especially for an organization like Hitachi."
"I would like to see more improvements with AS400 DB2. I journalled the tables/instance and the data migration is too slow if I compare it with other databases."
"The product itself is great, the biggest downside in my opinion is that it is hard to find (hire) people with expertise."
"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."
"To improve Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics, I suggest developing capabilities for cloud-based solutions instead of being solely on-premises."
"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."
"Their technical support is not good. I would rate them 2 out of 10 because they don't have good technical skills to solve problems."
"When dealing with substantial data volumes from cloud systems, performance can become an issue; even using the Enterprise Edition, the time required for executing particular pipeline tasks is notably high compared to other ETL tools such as ADF, DataBricks, or SSIS."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing cost of IBM InfoSphere Information Server depends on how many users there are."
"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 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."
"There was a cost analysis done and Pentaho did favorably in terms of cost."
"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."
"I believe the pricing of the solution is more affordable than the competitors"
"There is a good open source option (Community Edition)​."
"I primarily work on the Community Version, which is available to use free of charge."
"When we first started with it, it was much cheaper. It has gone up drastically, especially since Hitachi bought out Pentaho."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Educational Organization
9%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise32
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with IBM InfoSphere Information Server?
We are using the on-premises version of IBM InfoSphere Information Server, but we feel that all new development is mainly for the cloud. We receive corrections of errors, but we do not see new func...
What is your primary use case for IBM InfoSphere Information Server?
My usual use case for IBM InfoSphere Information Server is ETL, where we take data from one source to another data warehouse solution.
What advice do you have for others considering IBM InfoSphere Information Server?
We are about to change our platform from IBM AIX to SUSE Linux, as our whole platform is changing, so everyone should change from IBM to SUSE Linux. It would be very difficult for us to have a diff...
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

InfoSphere Information Server, IBM Information Server
Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Canadian National Railway Company, Chickasaw Nation Division of Commerce, Swedish Armed Forces, BG RCI, Janata Sahakari Bank Ltd., University of Arizona, Biogrid Australia
66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM InfoSphere Information Server vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.