IBM InfoSphere Information Server vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

IBM InfoSphere Information Server vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Download the complete report

Helped 865,384 peers since 2012

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

31st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Metadata Management (6th)

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 August 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of IBM InfoSphere Information Server is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

UmeshKumar1

Business Analyst Team Lead at Accenture

Prompt support, reliable, but lacking scalability

IBM InfoSphere Information Server has multiple tools in that product suite. However, we mainly use it as an integration tool I have been using IBM InfoSphere Information Server for approximately five years. IBM InfoSphere Information Server is stable. IBM InfoSphere Information Server should be…

Read full review

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…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The integration with different technologies is the most valuable feature."

"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"This solution is extremely flexible and scalable."

"IBM InfoSphere Information Server is stable."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"It has improved our data integration capabilities."

"The amount of data that it loads and processes is good."

"I can use Python, which is open-source, and I can run other scripts, including Linux scripts. It's user-friendly for running any object-based language. That's a very important feature because we live in a world of open-source."

"Data transformation within Pentaho is a nice feature that they have and that I value."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pros

Cons

"Their technical support needs improvement."

"There are certain shortcomings in the cloud side of the solution, where improvements are required."

"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."

"This solution would benefit from the engine being made more lightweight."

"It's not very stable, at least not in the case of the community edition. I'm working with the community edition right now and I think perhaps it is because of that it is not very stable, it causes the system to sometimes hang. I'm not sure if this is the case for pair tiers."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The support for the Enterprise Edition is okay, but what they have done in the last three or four years is move more and more things to that edition. The result is that they are breaking the Community Edition. That's what our impression is."

"The reporting definitely needs improvement. There are a lot of general, basic features that it doesn't have. A simple feature you would expect a reporting tool to have is the ability to search the repository for a report. It doesn't even have that capability. That's been a feature that we've been asking for since the beginning and it hasn't been implemented yet."

"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."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing cost of IBM InfoSphere Information Server depends on how many users there are."

"For most development tasks, the Enterprise edition should be sufficient. It depends on the type of support that you require for your production environment."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"You don't need the Enterprise Edition, you can go with the Community Edition. That way you can use it for free and, for free, it's a pretty good tool to use."

"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."

"The price of the regular version is not reasonable and it should be lower."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Integration solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Government

16%

Insurance Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM InfoSphere Information Server?

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

What needs improvement with IBM InfoSphere Information Server?

There are certain shortcomings in the cloud side of the solution, where improvements are required. In our company, we are presently in the process of doing a PoC phase since we have the solution cu...

What is your primary use case for IBM InfoSphere Information Server?

I use IBM InfoSphere Information Server in retail banking for transformation purposes.

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 InfoSphere Information Server

Comparisons

Compared 45% of the time

Oracle GoldenGate vs IBM InfoSphere Information Server

Compared 17% of the time

Qlik Replicate vs IBM InfoSphere Information Server

Compared 11% of the time

IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog vs IBM InfoSphere Information Server

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog vs IBM InfoSphere Information Server

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM InfoSphere Information Server Competitors

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

Compared 16% of the time

Informatica PowerCenter vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 10% of the time

SSIS vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 10% of the time

Talend Open Studio vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 8% of the time

SnapLogic vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 7% of the time

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Data Integration

Download IBM InfoSphere Information Server product report

IBM InfoSphere Information Server report

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Download Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics product report

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics report

Also Known As

InfoSphere Information Server, IBM Information Server

Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration

Overview

IBM InfoSphere Information Server is a market-leading data integration platform which includes a family of products that enable you to understand, cleanse, monitor, transform, and deliver data, as well as to collaborate to bridge the gap between business and IT. InfoSphere Information Server provides massively parallel processing (MPP) capabilities to deliver a highly scalable and flexible integration platform that handles a variety of data volumes (big, small, and everything in between).

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

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 Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute

IBM InfoSphere Information Server vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics