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Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs SAS Data Management 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
Pentaho Data Integration offers cost-effective, efficient ETL solutions with significant time savings, enhancing IT processes despite perceived obsolescence.
Sentiment score
5.8
SAS Data Management boosts data accuracy, reduces storage costs, and is vital in banking, finance, and pharmaceutical sectors.
I have seen a return on investment; my team was able to stay extremely small even though we had a lot of data integrations with many companies.
Principal Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I can testify to the return on investment with metrics regarding time saved; we have increased our efficiency by about 20 to 30 percent due to the swift migration processes facilitated by the tool.
Data Integration Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.1
Pentaho's support is praised for knowledge and responsiveness, but response times vary, especially for the community edition.
Sentiment score
7.1
Customer service satisfaction with SAS Data Management is high, despite regional differences and limited online resources, thanks to responsive support.
24/7 assistance is available for the Enterprise Edition.
Data architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
take the time to understand our business requirements, offering appropriate recommendations.
Data Integration Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Communication with the vendor is challenging
Data Architecture and Engineering Specialist at coprocenva
The support for SAS in Brazil is not the best one, but the support in Sweden is really good, as they visit the company and work to solve the issues.
Data Scientist & Scrum Master at Volvo Group
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
Pentaho scales well for small to medium data, but may struggle with large datasets, fitting diverse organizational roles.
Sentiment score
6.8
SAS Data Management is highly scalable, supporting enterprise tasks with robust servers, comparable to Oracle and Microsoft solutions.
It can be scaled well until you reach a point where you need to perform a lot of operations, and the issue arises when it runs out of memory to handle some data.
Data engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Pentaho Data Integration handles larger datasets better.
Data Architecture and Engineering Specialist at coprocenva
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics' scalability is commendable, as it allows us to scale up according to our needs.
Data architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Pentaho is generally stable and reliable, though occasional memory issues and bugs occur, especially in community editions.
Sentiment score
7.2
SAS Data Management is highly stable, especially on Linux, but might need client-side configurations for optimal performance.
Performance issues arise due to reliance on a flowchart-based mechanism instead of scripts, which can lead to longer execution times.
Data architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
I find that version 3.1 is the most stable version I have ever used.
Founder-CEO at Ubuntu Analytica
It's pretty stable, however, it struggles when dealing with smaller amounts of data.
Data Architecture and Engineering Specialist at coprocenva
 

Room For Improvement

Pentaho needs improved logging, debugging, user interface, performance, environment management, cloud support, documentation, and user feedback integration.
SAS Data Management needs improved usability, licensing, integration, cloud features, scalability, stability, and enhanced automated reporting and documentation.
We should also explore more effective partitioning for parallel processing and fine-tuning database connections to reduce load times and improve ETL speed.
Data Integration Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics can be improved by working with different environments, specifically the possibility to change the variables, meaning I write my variables only once and can change them for different environments such as production or development.
Founder-CEO at Ubuntu Analytica
I also lack the option to use programming languages beyond Python and SQL, and a provision to incorporate Scala code in the scripting component would be beneficial.
Data architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
There is significant room for improvement, especially with regard to using a hybrid approach that involves both CAS and persistent storage.
Associate Director at Woodpecker Analytics & Services
 

Setup Cost

Pentaho Data Integration provides free and paid versions, with users valuing cost-effectiveness despite rising Enterprise Edition prices.
SAS Data Management is powerful but costly, with affordability challenges for businesses, though educational trials and market-based pricing options exist.
I use the community version of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics, and I do not need additional costs.
Project Manager at Laberit
The setup cost was minimal, and the pricing experience was pretty good.
Data engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
From my experience, SAS Data Management is an expensive tool.
Associate Director at Woodpecker Analytics & Services
 

Valuable Features

Pentaho offers intuitive data integration with extensive customization, supporting rapid ETL development, big data, and minimal coding.
SAS Data Management provides user-friendly, comprehensive data handling with strong integration, quality, governance, and flexible connectivity features.
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics has positively impacted my organization because it meant we didn't have to write a lot of custom API back-end processing logic; it did the majority of that heavy lifting for us.
Principal Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It automates the data workflow, including extraction, cleansing, and loading into warehouses for BI reporting purposes, while also removing duplicates, validating data, and standardizing formats, enabling real-time decision-making.
Data Integration Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics has positively impacted my organization because it is easier to use, and my knowledge about this work facilitates the translation from the source to my final system.
Project Manager at Laberit
SAS Data Management stands out because of its data standardization, transformation, and verification capabilities.
Associate Director at Woodpecker Analytics & Services
The best features I appreciate about SAS Data Management tool are that it's easy to create the flows and schedule data, and the tables are not too big, making it easy to control the ETL process, including user access which is also easy to manage in SAS.
Data Scientist & Scrum Master at Volvo Group
 

Categories and Ranking

Pentaho Data Integration an...
Ranking in Data Integration
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAS Data Management
Ranking in Data Integration
29th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Data Quality (7th), Data Governance (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.5%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAS Data Management is 1.1%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics1.5%
SAS Data Management1.1%
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.
FK
Data Scientist & Scrum Master at Volvo Group
Has supported centralized data access and improved governance through unified administration
The best features I appreciate about SAS Data Management tool are that it's easy to create the flows and schedule data, and the tables are not too big, making it easy to control the ETL process, including user access which is also easy to manage in SAS. The data integration tools with SAS Data Management were quite good because they allowed me to do all lineage, to manage and see all the variables, find the libraries where the data is, and understand the data in just one tool. Offering another development environment combining code and predefined objects, where I could just drag and drop to achieve what I needed, although some objects were not too good, but some were effective. The metadata management feature of SAS Data Management helps a lot; creating your data marts or data lake with good naming conventions, library conventions, and so on is very important because it allows easy queries to find the whole structure, though I think metadata governance also depends on first definitions, not only on the tool. SAS Data Management is very good for data governance; for me, it was the best tool I worked with in data management, although I don't have too much experience with others, and it truly helped a lot.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Educational Organization
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise30
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Data Management?
From my experience, SAS Data Management is an expensive tool.
What needs improvement with SAS Data Management?
There is significant room for improvement, especially with regard to using a hybrid approach that involves both CAS and persistent storage.
What is your primary use case for SAS Data Management?
The main idea for using SAS Data Management was to bring all data inside SAS. I brought the finance area and the sales area in the company that I have worked, along with some market planning data, ...
 

Also Known As

Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
SAS Data Management Platform, Data Management Platform, DataFlux
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Data Management, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Absa, Aegon, Allianz Global Corporate & SpecialtyAusgrid, Bank of Queensland, Bell, BMC Software, Canada Post, Ceska pojistovna, Chantecler, Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, Credit Guarantee Corporation, Cr_dito y Cauci‹n, Delaware State Police, Deutsche Lufthansa, Directorate of Economics and Statistics, DSM, Enerjisa, ERGO Insurance Group, Florida Department of Corrections, Generali Hellas, Gitanjali Group, Gloucestershire Constabulary, GS Home Shopping, HealthPartners, IAG New Zealand, iJET, Invacare, Livzon Pharmaceutical Group, Los Angeles County, Miami Herald Media Company, Netherlands Enterprise Agency, New Zealand Ministry of Health, Nippon Paper, North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services, Orlando Magic, OTP Group, PITT OHIO, Plano Independent School District, RWE Poland, Spanish Air Force, Stockholm County Council, Telus, The Travel Corporation, Transitions Optical, Triad Analytic Solutions, UNIQA, US Census Bureau, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, West Midlands Police, XS Inc., Zenith Insurance
Find out what your peers are saying about Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs. SAS Data Management and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.