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Pentaho Business Analytics vs Workday Adaptive Planning comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 21, 2026

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
7.2
Adaptive Insights offers significant ROI and savings through efficient budgeting, reporting, and enhanced planning within the first year.
 

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
7.7
Adaptive Insights' customer service is lauded for quick, efficient responses, knowledgeable support, and valuable resources, despite occasional delays.
 

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
6.9
Adaptive Insights offers strong scalability and efficiency, though integration and implementation efforts vary across different organizations.
 

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
7.0
Adaptive Insights is highly stable with quick issue resolution, praised for reliability, version control, and minimal downtime.
 

Room For Improvement

Pentaho Business Analytics lacks an intuitive interface, robust integration, self-service features, and requires technical expertise, limiting usability.
Adaptive Insights must enhance pricing, integration, data visualization, planning features, UI, support, and functionality for better competitiveness.
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.
DBA at Federal University of Uberlândia
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers find the free Pentaho Community Edition cost-effective, while the Enterprise Edition offers value with support and features.
Adaptive Insights offers competitive subscription pricing with efficiency benefits, though costs vary by user type and quantity.
Pentaho Business Analytics is priced similarly to other competitors such as QlikView and Tableau.
DBA at Federal University of Uberlândia
 

Valuable Features

Pentaho Business Analytics provides easy data integration, customizable dashboards, extensive connectivity, and supports efficient data transformation and delivery.
Adaptive Insights delivers scalable cloud solutions with integrated reporting, enhancing business planning through consolidation, forecasting, and ERP integration.
It is a stable product, and it can handle large datasets.
DBA at Federal University of Uberlândia
 

Categories and Ranking

Pentaho Business Analytics
Ranking in Reporting
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (21st), Cloud Operations Analytics (2nd)
Workday Adaptive Planning
Ranking in Reporting
23rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Business Performance Management (10th), Financial Performance and Strategy Management (4th), Data Visualization (20th), ESG Reporting Software (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Pentaho Business Analytics is 2.3%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Workday Adaptive Planning is 1.9%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Pentaho Business Analytics2.3%
Workday Adaptive Planning1.9%
Other95.8%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Andrew Rosenberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Adaptive Planning Manager at Alight
Adaptive scales well, simple to create new budget versions and models
For the organization I used to work at, it streamlined the process of creating budgets. It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday. So that made it easy. Reporting was pretty easy to set up as well. It streamlined the amount of time it took to do the budget as well as kind of making it simple to implement a rolling forecast process. So, it really was more just a productivity increase and time shortening for the budgeting and forecasting process.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Reporting solutions are best for your needs.
909,153 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise10
 

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 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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics
Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cargo 2000 Lufthansa, Marketo, ModCloth, Cardiac Science, Telefonica, ExactTarget, Active Broadband Networks, and Brussels Airport.
1. Cisco Systems 2. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated 3. Deloitte 4. DocuSign 5. Dropbox 6. Electronic Arts 7. Fender Musical Instruments Corporation 8. Fitbit 9. Fossil Group 10. Groupon 11. Hilton Worldwide 12. HP Inc. 13. Intuit 14. Johnson & Johnson 15. LinkedIn 16. Lyft 17. McAfee 18. Medtronic 19. Netflix 20. Oracle 21. Pandora 22. PayPal 23. Pinterest 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. ServiceNow 27. Slack Technologies 28. Spotify 29. Symantec 30. Tableau Software 31. Twitter 32. Workday
Find out what your peers are saying about Pentaho Business Analytics vs. Workday Adaptive Planning and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,153 professionals have used our research since 2012.