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Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs SAP Replication Server 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
SAP Replication Server
Ranking in Data Integration
43rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (20th)
 

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 SAP Replication Server is 0.8%, up from 0.5% 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%
SAP Replication Server0.8%
Other97.6%
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.
reviewer1834542 - PeerSpot reviewer
Finance Business Process Improvement, Transformation and Project Management at a consultancy with self employed
Eliminates replication and allows you to use only one database, speeding up performance and reducing amount of storage
The private solution is expensive. If you're in a situation where you're paying IBM or AWS or somebody just to host you specifically, you're paying people to run it and you're taking care of all the upgrades. As a company, you're either hiring or paying an outsourcer to do that, and you have to manage it, keep up with the updates to the hardware, software, and the operating system. It's very expensive because there's a lot to control and take care of.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"You can get ETL, reporting, analysis, and analytics in a single shop."
"If we didn't have this solution, we wouldn't be able to manage our workload or generate the volume of reporting that we currently do."
"Flexible deployment, in any environment, is very important to us. That is the key reason why we ended up with these tools. Because we have a very highly secure environment, we must be able to install it in multiple environments on multiple different servers. The fact that we could use the same tool in all our environments, on-prem and in the cloud, was very important to us."
"It's very simple compared to other products out there."
"Sometimes, it took a whole team about two weeks to get all the data to prepare and present it, and after the optimization of the data, it took about one to two hours to do the whole process."
"As a result of one of the projects that we did in the Middle East, we achieved the main goal of fully digitalizing their population census."
"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."
"Before we used Pentaho, our processes were in Microsoft Excel and the updates from databases had to be done manually, but now all our routines are done automatically and we have more time to do other jobs, saving us four or five hours daily."
"Currently, there is a Hadoop-based infrastructure with several engineers to maintain the data, and now, using SAP Replication Server, it has become automatic and requires fewer people to put data in the data warehouse."
"It's pretty good at handling replication, even under high load. It also provides cross-database replication, for example, from Sybase to Oracle."
"The most valuable thing about this product is that it replicates data between SAP databases (ASE to IQ) very successfully."
"We use this solution for all kinds of communications like RFC, BAPI, IDoc, connecting with the orders, accounts, finance, data stuff, banking, everything."
"We can customize any workflow and we also like the business domain modeling that can be done."
"SAP Replication Server is an application that I consider to be a robust system. It has proven to be highly reliable in my experience."
"SAP is renovating different things. We are using external tools to connect as of now. It is going well, and now the new generation integration platforms are going to be pretty easy."
"This product has a catalog with the location of all the objects which were replicated, and it's very simple to maintain."
 

Cons

"I think Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics needs additional plugins for the market, and for some specific tasks it is very difficult."
"I would like to see improvement when it comes to integrating structured data with text data or anything that is unstructured."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see more improvements with AS400 DB2. I journalled the tables/instance and the data migration is too slow if I compare it with other databases."
"I would like to see improvement when it comes to integrating structured data with text data or anything that is unstructured. Sometimes we get all kinds of different files that we need to integrate into the warehouse."
"Should provide additional control for the data warehouse"
"I could not connect to our Hadoop environment in an easy and flexible way, and it was important to scale our data warehouse."
"There is a need to improve performance in high transactional processes."
"I would like to see it become mobile-friendly."
"There is room for improvement in terms of pricing and faster support."
"Improvement is a never ending story, and HANA is doing some improvements. We are able to adopt that, and we have to do it by integration with HANA. They are very major changes that we need to see."
"Setup was a little complex."
"It's a very expensive solution."
"The private solution is expensive. If you're in a situation where you're paying IBM or AWS or somebody just to host you specifically, you're paying people to run it and you're taking care of all the upgrades."
"It's complex. It's necessary to understand a little about infrastructure, like network LAN and VLAN environment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It does seem a bit expensive compared to the serverless product offering. Tools, such as Server Integration Services, are "almost" free with a database engine. It is comparable to products like Alteryx, which is also very expensive."
"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 primarily work on the Community Version, which is available to use free of charge."
"If a company is looking for an ETL solution and wants to integrate it with their tech stack but doesn't want to spend a bunch of money, Pentaho is a good solution"
"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."
"I mostly used the open-source version. I didn't work with a license."
"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."
"You can pick one of the hosted cloud services as opposed to owning it and doing it yourself. Your cost of ownership on the hardware, the data storage, and the maintenance all go down. It depends on what service you use."
"It's a very expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Educational Organization
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
17%
Retailer
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

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 Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

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...
What needs improvement with SAP Replication Server?
SAP can provide better support for cross-database replication to newer technologies. The product supports Oracle, but I am not aware of what other technologies it supports. If someone wants to repl...
What is your primary use case for SAP Replication Server?
It's basically to transfer data from one server to another. It's used for this purpose.
 

Also Known As

Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
Sybase Replication Server
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Find out what your peers are saying about Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs. SAP Replication Server and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.