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Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs Qlik Compose comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

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

Pentaho Data Integration an...
Ranking in Data Integration
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Qlik Compose
Ranking in Data Integration
47th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.6%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qlik Compose is 1.0%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics1.6%
Qlik Compose1.0%
Other97.4%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Sahil Taneja - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant/Manager at Tenzing
Easy matching and reconciliation of data
The initial setup was easy for the data warehousing concept. But for a person who is new to ETL and warehousing concepts, it may take some time. If someone is familiar with these concepts, they could understand and learn the tool quickly. However, compared to other tools, the UI is complex. It would be helpful to have a better UI and documentation for new users. As of now, there is a challenge in learning the Compose tool for new users altogether. Qlik Compose was deployed on-premises. But the servers, like the SQL servers were maintained on the cloud—the managed instances.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Lumada has allowed us to interact with our employees more effectively and compensate them properly. One of the cool things is that we use it to generate commissions for our salespeople and bonuses for our warehouse people. It allows us to get information out to them in a timely fashion. We can also see where they're at and how they're doing."
"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."
"You can get ETL, reporting, analysis, and analytics in a single shop."
"It's my understanding that the product can scale."
"The fact that it's a low-code solution is valuable. It's good for more junior people who may not be as experienced with programming."
"Since we started using Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics, many of our manual tasks have become automatic, and we have increased our time for productive things."
"Pentaho Data Integration is easy to use, especially when transforming data."
"Provides a good open source option."
"One of the most valuable features of this tool is its automation capabilities, allowing us to design the warehouse in an automated manner. Additionally, we can generate Data Lifecycle Policies (DLP) reports and efficiently implement updates and best practices based on proven design patterns."
"I have found it to be a very good, stable, and strong product."
"Qlik Compose is good enough. It is user-friendly and intuitive."
"It is a scalable solution."
"It's a stable solution."
"As long as you pick the solution that best fits with your requirements, you won't find that performance is a problem. It's good."
"It can scale."
"There were many valuable features, such as extracting any data to put in the cloud. For example, Qlik was able to gather data from SAP and extract SAP data from the platforms."
 

Cons

"Some old plugins, after a long time, still doesn’t work properly enough."
"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."
"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."
"One thing that I don't like, just a little, is the backward compatibility."
"Its performance can be improved so it will work better with Big Data. Also, sometimes it can be very buggy which keeps away some potential users."
"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."
"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."
"Support for common Hadoop utilities can be expanded, such as bulk load with composite row keys for HBase, and include drivers for Impala out-of-the-box."
"I believe that visual data flow management and the transformation function should be improved."
"My issues with the solution's stability are owing to the fact that it has certain bugs causing issues in some functionalities that should be working."
"It could enhance its capabilities in the realm of self-service options as currently, it is more suited for individuals with technical proficiency who can create pages using it."
"It would be better if the first level of technical support were a bit more technically knowledgeable to solve the problem. I think they could also improve the injection of custom scripts. It is pretty difficult to add additional scripts. If the modeling doesn't give you what you want, and you want to change the script generated by the modeling, it is a bit more challenging than in most other products. It is very good with standard form type systems, but if you get a more complicated data paradigm, it tends to struggle with transforming that into a model."
"When processing data from certain tables with a large volume of data, we encounter significant delays. For instance, when dealing with around one million records, it typically takes three to four hours. To address this, I aim to implement performance improvements across all tables, ensuring swift processing similar to those that are currently complete within seconds. The performance issue primarily arises when we analyze the inserts and updates from the source, subsequently dropping the table. While new insertions are handled promptly, updates are processed slowly, leading to performance issues. Despite consulting our Qlik vendors, they were unable to pinpoint the exact cause of this occurrence. Consequently, I am seeking ways to optimize performance within Qlik Compose, specifically concerning updates."
"The solution has room for improvement in the ETL. They have an ETL, but when it comes to the monitoring portion, Qlik Compose doesn't provide a feature for monitoring."
"There should be proper documentation available for the implementation process."
"For more complex work, we are not using Qlik Compose because it cannot handle very high volumes at the moment. It needs the same batching capabilities that other ETL tools have. We can't batch the data into small chunks when transforming large amounts of data. It tries to do everything in one shot and that's where it fails."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"For most development tasks, the Enterprise edition should be sufficient. It depends on the type of support that you require for your production environment."
"You need to go through the paid version to have Hitachi Lumada specialized support. However, if you are using the free version, then you will have only the community support. You will depend on the releases from Hitachi to solve some problem or questions that you have, such as bug fixes. You will need to wait for the newest versions or releases to solve these types of problems."
"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."
"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."
"We are using the Community Edition. We have been trying to use and sell the Enterprise version, but that hasn't been possible due to the budget required for it."
"I think Lumada's price is fair compared to some of the others, like BusinessObjects, which is was the other thing that I used at my previous job. BusinessObject's price was more reasonable before SAP acquired it. They jacked the price up significantly. Oracle's OBIEE tool was also prohibitively expensive."
"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."
"While they outperform Tableau, there's room for improvement in Qlik's pricing structures, especially for corporate clients like us."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive, I rate the solution a six."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Educational Organization
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise31
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Which ETL tool would you recommend to populate data from OLTP to OLAP?
There are two products I know about * TimeXtender : Microsoft based, Transformation logic is quiet good and can easily be extended with T-SQL , Has a semantic layer that generates metat data for cu...
 

Also Known As

Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
Compose, Attunity Compose
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Poly-Wood
Find out what your peers are saying about Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs. Qlik Compose and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.