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Looker Studio vs Pentaho Business Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

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

Looker Studio
Ranking in Reporting
12th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Pentaho Business Analytics
Ranking in Reporting
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (19th), Cloud Operations Analytics (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Looker Studio is 2.5%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Business Analytics is 2.3%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Looker Studio2.5%
Pentaho Business Analytics2.3%
Other95.2%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

Heron Ziegel - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Engineer at Quartz Consulting Group
Has supported quick dashboard creation and data sharing but lacks tools for managing multiple reports efficiently
We integrated Looker Studio with other platforms in our data ecosystem; we tried integrating with Sheets, and that went okay, but it could have been better. It could have been better because it needed a very specific format to read the data, so we had to reformat the sheet file. Looker Studio was mostly just helpful in that it provided live updating charts for tracking performance indicators in the organization. Integrating with a database was very difficult because there wasn't a lot of feedback for what was going wrong with the connection. I don't remember if we reached out to support. I didn't personally reach out, but my boss may have. I didn't reach out to support, so I do not have experience with it to rate it. We worked with the free version of Looker Studio initially, and we upgraded at some point to the pro version; I don't remember if we actually paid for it or if it was just a free trial. The pricing was reasonable. I remember doing a price comparison, and it was pretty reasonable, but it did have fewer features than a lot of other software, which was okay for a comparable price but a little cheaper.
JB
Founder at SJT Consult
Solution enables effective ETL processes and exhibits high satisfaction
From an integration perspective, Pentaho Business Analytics is not the best tool on the market. There are things done by Apache that are better, though I am not the one implementing them, so this is based on what I have heard about novelties in the market. I do not see the need to extend the coverage of Pentaho Business Analytics's domain. For things that it does not do, there are better solutions on the market, and it would be costly to implement them. Pentaho Business Analytics is a very great tool for very specific standardized scenarios. If you need more complex elastic solutions because the process is different, there are better tools available.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We previously used Microsoft Power BI, but Google is better."
"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."
"I would rate this solution eight or nine out of ten."
"I am impressed with the tool's scheduling mechanism, refresh mechanism, and different types of charts."
"What I appreciate about Looker Studio is mostly the clean visuals, which is good, as I prefer a dashboard with a clean aesthetic rather than feeling sort of an old Windows type of dashboard."
"The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. We observed the progress of our portfolio from last week to the current week, allowing us to compare revenues."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and the plethora of query sources."
"Looker's ability to perform aggregation before visualization allows for effective data slicing and dicing."
"We wanted a tool where by using it we could integrate multiple data sets, and could get responsive reports and Pentaho helped us do this in a good way."
"I'm working on poverty alleviation in Indonesia; this tool has improved the ability to make good decisions for policy makers."
"The data integration feature is the most valuable feature for us."
"When I have a customer that wants to have a real ETL tool in a standardized way with a real code written product, it is the cheapest."
"I use Pentaho everyday in my company, creating new BI environments for my customers."
"The most valuable feature of Pentaho is the Tableau report."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' best features include the ease of developing data flows and the wide range of options to connect to databases, including those on the cloud."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
 

Cons

"The tool should come up with data modeling layer features that are present in other products like Power BI."
"There is a significant degree of sophistication required to compete with Tableau or Cognos."
"When you physically install a product on one machine instead of the cloud, you have a better visibility, best icon quality, etc.. It's more of an issue with how we are adapting to the transition."
"It's not yet a replacement for a complete BI tool."
"There is a significant degree of sophistication required to compete with Tableau or Cognos."
"The performance of Looker needs improvement, particularly the report loading time, which is critical for business users."
"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."
"The tool should improve on live data integration for quicker data reflection."
"There are too many bugs in our version."
"Pentaho, at the general level, should greatly improve the easy construction of its dashboards and easy integration of information from different sources without technical user intervention."
"We are a big telecoms company and we deal with a lot of data, approximately two million per day; it is too slow in rendering it."
"There are issues with clustering, and partitioning which we have reported."
"It's still not user friendly or robust enough for our needs."
"The tool is very good, and yet it has some problems as it relies heavily on Java."
"Pentaho, at the general level, should greatly improve the easy construction of its dashboards and easy integration of information from different sources without technical user intervention."
"Customer Service: A 3/5. The support is prompt and timely, but there have been some technical limitations sometimes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is free."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"I think the tool is cheap because you don't need to pay anything for using the tool. However, when connecting and analyzing other data sources, you should consider where to analyze this information because Google Data Studio doesn't handle much data well. You must also consider how you will connect this data to it. In this case, you might need to hire DevOps or a data team to help with these issues."
"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."
"The product is available for free."
"Pentaho is expensive ."
"We were lucky enough to find a Pentaho OEM partner who offered a data warehouse model and the ETL software for about 60K SGD per year."
"Free and commercial versions are available."
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Comparison Review

it_user6978 - PeerSpot reviewer
Co-Founder at Helical IT Solution (Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Talend, Kettle, DWBI, ETL, Ctools, iReport, Jasper Report)
Jun 10, 2013
Jaspersoft vs. Pentaho – Which one to use & is there any need to purchase the commercial edition
Any company (be it technology, manfucaturing, human resource, ecommerce, SME etc) always has the need for Business Intelligence to some or the other extent. If cost is one of the consideration factor, then the 2 BI tools which are at the forefront are Pentaho and Jaspersoft. But, often the same…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Google Data Studio?
I would appreciate improvements in the data modeling features, as it's not straightforward, and it's not what people in analytics are used to. Specifically, most people using this visualization too...
What is your primary use case for Google Data Studio?
I used Looker Studio mainly for reporting, where I created multiple dashboards on it. I wouldn't say I made the most of the usage of the connections because all the connections were based on flat f...
What advice do you have for others considering Google Data Studio?
I confirm that we have a call regarding my experience with Zoho. Looker Studio is a good visualization tool, but I wouldn't say there's a specific feature that stands out in terms of tracking metri...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pentaho Business Analytics?
Pentaho Business Analytics offers the best value for money. While improvements can be made in some areas, particularly with more cloud-based solutions, it is not in their domain because they do not...
What needs improvement with Pentaho Business Analytics?
From an integration perspective, Pentaho Business Analytics is not the best tool on the market. There are things done by Apache that are better, though I am not the one implementing them, so this i...
 

Also Known As

Data Studio
Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Genesys, Shueisha
Cargo 2000 Lufthansa, Marketo, ModCloth, Cardiac Science, Telefonica, ExactTarget, Active Broadband Networks, and Brussels Airport.
Find out what your peers are saying about Looker Studio vs. Pentaho Business Analytics and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.