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Pentaho Business Analytics vs Qlik Sense comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
5.4
Pentaho Business Analytics mixed ROI perceptions highlight efficiency gains but unclear returns compared to competitors like QlikView and Tableau.
Sentiment score
6.3
Companies achieve quick and substantial ROI with Qlik Sense, citing cost savings, increased revenue, and enhanced decision-making efficiency.
In my organization, we moved from OBI to Qlik Sense due to limitations with OBI, resulting in very high ROI.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.5
Pentaho Business Analytics receives mixed reviews for customer support, with users relying heavily on forums and community assistance.
Sentiment score
5.3
Users appreciate Qlik Sense stability, community resources, and consulting services, despite mixed reviews on technical support response times.
While tech support is comprehensive, the stability of Qlik Sense means I generally do not need it.
In Turkey, the consultant firms are very professional, and they support you.
I think they lack in the support system.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.0
Pentaho Business Analytics is scalable with good performance but occasionally needs professional help for complex data handling.
Sentiment score
7.7
Qlik Sense efficiently scales with ease of adding RIM nodes, though licensing is costly, favored by large enterprises.
It is easily scalable with Microsoft, with other services Azure and other tools they provide.
Qlik Sense helps analyze data and can handle larger amounts of data compared to other BI tools.
It performs well in terms of performance and load compared to others.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.5
Pentaho Business Analytics is stable but may face Java caching issues, impacting performance and requiring careful cache management.
Sentiment score
7.6
Qlik Sense is highly stable with reliable performance, minor setup issues, but excellent support and consistent updates.
It can handle large datasets.
The stability is very good.
 

Room For Improvement

Pentaho Business Analytics lacks an intuitive interface, robust integration, self-service features, and requires technical expertise, limiting usability.
Qlik Sense needs enhanced statistical functions, data integration, ETL, customization, visualization, governance, efficiency, and user-friendly interfaces.
Pentaho Business Analytics is hard to learn and not suited for initial users as it requires knowledge of operating systems, Java, and other technical skills.
Providing an API feature to access data from the dashboard or QEDs could be beneficial.
There should be more comprehensive documentation and explanatory videos available to help clients understand and calculate capacity-based pricing, making it easier to predict costs before implementing Qlik Sense Cloud.
Power BI has better visualizations and interactions with updates in 2023 that provide ease of use.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers find the free Pentaho Community Edition cost-effective, while the Enterprise Edition offers value with support and features.
Qlik Sense offers competitive pricing with flexible, scalable licensing, offsetting initial costs for enterprises considering its fast implementation.
Pentaho Business Analytics is priced similarly to other competitors such as QlikView and Tableau.
It is just about how expensive it is to implement.
For small or large organizations needing many or few licenses, pricing varies.
Among the BI tools and data analytics tools, Qlik is the most expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Pentaho Business Analytics provides easy data integration, customizable dashboards, extensive connectivity, and supports efficient data transformation and delivery.
Qlik Sense excels in user-friendly data visualization, rapid integration, and insightful analytics with advanced features like GeoAnalytics and AI.
It is a stable product, and it can handle large datasets.
From an end-user perspective, it's convenient and performance-oriented, providing something meaningful from all the organization's data.
It has an interactive interface with Qlik graphs, pivot, and interactivity, which makes it easier to use than other tools.
The Qlik Answers component, featuring generative AI capability, enables users to get answers from unstructured data including Excel, HTML documents, or Microsoft Word documents by creating a knowledge base.
 

Categories and Ranking

Pentaho Business Analytics
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (20th), Cloud Operations Analytics (4th), Reporting (13th)
Qlik Sense
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
120
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (4th), Embedded BI (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Pentaho Business Analytics is designed for BI (Business Intelligence) Tools and holds a mindshare of 0.5%, down 0.6% compared to last year.
Qlik Sense, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 7.0% mindshare, down 9.4% since last year.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
Excels in handling unstructured data, helping organizations navigate through different storage systems
Pentaho can help organizations by providing them an insight of their unstructured data using one platform(Pentaho Business Analytics). The features are almost identical to other BIS platforms but to me, customers can benefit as it has a community version with most of its Enterprise features. It also has a free limited-period trial version. The other feature that I would like to share here is, that users have access to a complete spectrum of data from different sources with the system’s adaptive big data layer, which takes the source of the data into account. The software is built on an open architecture and can be integrated with multiple systems. However, Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics has been acquired by HDS which offers an Enterprise edition for organizations that also need to meet product compliance.
Vishal_Goyal - PeerSpot reviewer
In-memory data storage boosts performance
The advantages compared to other BI tools show architectural differences. The main feature is that it keeps all the data in memory. It doesn't retrieve the data from data sources when I need it on the dashboard; instead, it quickly provides the desired data, making it very fast compared to other BI tools. The ROI is very high using Qlik Sense. It offers many benefits of BI. It is flexible from a developer's point of view, allowing me to accomplish many tasks compared to other BI tools. From an end-user perspective, it's convenient and performance-oriented, providing something meaningful from all the organization's data.
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Comparison Review

it_user6978 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
20%
Computer Software Company
10%
Educational Organization
7%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
Educational Organization
17%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 is priced similarly to other competitors such as QlikView ( /products/qlikview-reviews ) and Tableau ( /products/tableau-reviews ). I usually use the community edition.
What needs improvement with Pentaho Business Analytics?
Pentaho Business Analytics ( /categories/bi-business-intelligence-tools ) is hard to learn and not suited for initial users as it requires knowledge of operating systems, Java, and other technical ...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
What do you like most about Qlik Sense?
The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qlik Sense?
Costs depend on the deal. They offer various licensing metrics based on our needs. For small or large organizations needing many or few licenses, pricing varies. For solutions used by many clients,...
 

Also Known As

Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics
QlikSense
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cargo 2000 Lufthansa, Marketo, ModCloth, Cardiac Science, Telefonica, ExactTarget, Active Broadband Networks, and Brussels Airport.
Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.