Pentaho Business Analytics Reviews

I use the BI Server, CDE Dashboards, Saiku, and Kettle, because these tools are very good and highly experienced.

The first eight years, I used this tool in one company. Now, I have some customers who hire me to give them advice. I have a couple of great customers in my country and they are very satisfied because they have increased productivity and lowered costs.

Pentaho, at the general level, should greatly improve the easy construction of its dashboards and easy integration of information from different sources without technical user intervention.

For 12 years. I have been using Pentaho CE 6.0 and 7.0. Last year, I implemented Pentaho CE 5.0.

I am actually trying to use Pentaho 7.0 CE and determine if it has some issues. In Pentaho EE, I have several years using it without having issues.

No, it is a highly experienced tool. It can do anything.

Really, I don't know about the support of Pentaho EE. As for the support of Pentaho CE, it is bad. Fortunately, I am highly experienced and use it very little.

To start, the first configurations were very difficult. I started with the CE version and without good documentation or support. I spent years learning for myself.

Hire specialized support for Pentaho. If customers want a professional tool and have the money, they should invest in the enterprise version of Pentaho or hire a company from your country specializing in Pentaho with high experience.

Here are the valuable features:

• Open source solution
• Fully integrated
• Customizable
• Extensible with a large community behind it
• Has a powerful ETL process (Pentaho Data Integration)

It helps us build decision supported systems. The use of MicroStrategy improved the decision-making process through enterprise report automation and corporate information management.

I would like to see self-service analysis and front-end tools.

The "self-service" feature of all BI tools deals with let final user (normally not tech one) do his/her work navigating data in a freely and not organized way.

Is exactly the opposite as create and manage a DW where data, metadata, are known and processed before.

Normally, traditional BI tools are more complex and complete managing traditional DW and in recent years other BI tools (like Qlik and Tableau for example) appears to fulfill this features.

We have used this solution for five years.

There have been no stability issues. There were some minor bugs that were fixed by the manufacturer in their regular patches.

There have been no scalability issues. Pentaho is based on industry standards to build scalable solutions. It’s very simple to scale up, horizontally, and vertically.

Technical support is good.

The installation had medium complexity. There is good documentation, but you have to follow certain procedures before using it.

This solution has an open source philosophy. There is a community edition without license costs, although it takes some more time to develop.

There is also an enterprise option that allows you to perform certain tasks easily and includes support.

Have a global and corporate design in mind. However, start with a particular area, small and well-defined.

Pentaho is a suite with five main products: Pentaho Data Integration for ETL, Pentaho Business Analytics Server for results delivery and development clients Report Designer, Metadata Editor and Schema Workbench.

Pentaho Data Integration's (PDI, former Kettle) features and resources are virtually unbeatable as it can handle everything from the smallest Excel files to the most complex and demanding data loads. It's able to scale from a single desktop computer to lots of nodes, on premises or in the cloud. Not only is it powerful, but it is also easy to use. I have never worked with anything else, like Informatica's PowerCenter or Microsoft's SSIS but I have always taken the opportunity to inquire who has. Lastly, PDI is easier to use and achieves more with less effort than those other products.

Then there is the Pentaho BA Server, built to be the linchpin on BI delivery for enterprises. It is built on a scalable, auditable platform able to deliver from dashboards and reports to OLAP and custom-made features. It supports background processing, results bursting by e-mail, load balacing (through native Java Webserver - like Tomcat - load balancing features), integration with corporate directories services as MS Active Directory and LDAP directories, with account management and lots of bell and whistles.

The suite's plugin architecture deserves a special remark: Both PDI and BA Server are built to be easily extended with plugins. There are two plugins marketplaces, one for PDI and onde for BA Server, with a good supply of diverse features. It all those plugins are not enough, there are means to develop you own plugin either coding in Java (mostly for PDI) or, for the BA Server, with point-and-click ease with Sparkl, a BA Server plugin for easy development and packing of new BA Server plugins (but some need of JavaScript, CSS and HTML is needed.)

Any company is able to design and delivery a deep and embrancing BI strategy with Pentaho. At its relatively low prices, when sided with comparable competition, the most valuable features are the data integration and the results delivery platform.

I work for the largest government owned IT enterprise in Brazil, employing over 10.000 people with yearly earning in surplus of half billion dollars. Designing and delivering timely BI solutions used to be a bogged down process because everything involved license costs. With Pentaho we were able to better suit our needs and better serve our customers. We use CE were for our departamental BI needs, and deliver solid service to our customers using paid licenses. Also, in being so complete, Pentaho has enabled a whole new level of experimentation and testing. We can completlly evaluate a customer need with CE licenses and then delivery the solution at a price, assembling it over EE licenses. We need paid support for our customers in order to be able to timely answer any outage.

Pentaho has a solid foundation and decent user interfaces. They are lacking, however, in the tool space for data exploration/presentation. The recent Data Discovery trend put a lot of strain on visual data analysis tools suppliers and Pentaho has chosen to strengthen their data integration features, aiming for Big Data and Hadoop growing market. The work on visual data exploring tools was then mainly left for the community to tackle on.

So, there is room for improvement regarding graphical interface for data exploration and presentation. Please note that there is no wanting for decent tools, only that the tools are not as sharp and as beautiful as QlikView, for instance. Pentaho delivers, no question, it only does not pleases the eye that much.

I have been using the whole Pentaho suite for nine years. I have also self-published a book on Pentaho and regularly write for my BI/Pentaho blog.

Being such a young product, experiencing fast evolution and rapid company growth, not every time things are bug free. Every new release cames in with its share of new bugs. Any upgrades were not without concerns, although there were never risk of losing data - Pentaho is simple to an extreme and hardly we find some nasty dependency hurting our deliveries.

The main deploy problems were with LDAP and Apache integration. There is a need for quite some knowledge on web servers architecture to allow a team a smooth delivery experience.

We did encounter stability issues. Being a data intensive application, Pentaho is quite sensitive to RAM limitations. Whenever not enough RAM is allocated for it to work, it would progressively slow down to a crawl and then to a halt. Lots of well managed disk cache and server clustering aleviates it though.

Pentaho scales really very well.

Pentaho Data Integration scalation is a breeze: just setup the machines, configure the slaves and master and that is it. One has only to enable the jobs and transformation to take advantage of PDI's clustering abilities, and that might be tricky but easy nonetheless. Bottom line of data integration scalability is limited to developers ingenuity on data processing compartmentalization so processing parallelization and remote processing become profitable for clustering.

Pentaho BA Server also scales well, on a quite standard load balancing scheme. Being a regular and well behaved Java program, the Pentaho BA Server is enabled to be clustered on the Java web server, like JBoss, or in a Apache/Tomcats multi-server loading balancing schema.

It is not for the amateur Pentaho administration to do it, however. In fact, a Pentaho administrator alone probably will have a degree of difficulty to achieve server scaling, and would be better of having help from web server clustering professionals.

My company has been served only be the Brazilian Pentaho's representative, which are knockout good guys and gals, which deliver it at any cost! They have even brought in Pentaho technicians from USA to assess some of our issues. Only kudos to them. I cannot opine on US or Europe support, but I have no reason to think less of them.

Technical support is a mixed issue with Pentaho. As previously stated, it is a young product, from a young company. The technical support by the means of instructions manuals, fora, Wikis and the like is quite good. However, the fast growing has left some breaches along the documentation body.

For instance, I needed to find how to enable certain feature on reporting designing. I was not able to find it in the official help guides, but there was the project leader blog where I found a post talking about it. With the correct terming I was able to look for it in the International Forum, where lying there was the answer I was in need of. So, overall it is good, but it is still in the road for a complete and centralized, well managed, gapless documentation body.

In fact we are still using the whole lot: MicroStrategy, Business Objects, and PowerCenter. We have not turned off all those implementations, only Pentaho clang all around us like weed - it is so easy to start using and gives results with so little effort it is almost impossible to use something else. Most of the time, we offer other options only at the customers requesting. Otherwise, left to us, we are most likely to propose using Pentaho.

Hard answer: both. We got up to delivering results in almost no time. However, a sizeable lot of little vicious details kept resisting to us - most issues with stability, latter associated with RAM limitations, and user management, tied to LDAP integration. Part of the said difficulties stemed from bugs, too, so there were only a matter of time waiting for Pentaho to fix them,

After that the customer kicked in a lot of small changes and adaptations, truly to the "since-we-are-at-it"-scope-creep-spirit (some rightful, some pure fancy), which had us and Pentaho scratching our mutual heads. In the end we kinda helped them advance some updates in the Server. And delivered all that was asked.

We started with our in house team and when things started to get too much weird or complicated the vendor team landed in. After that first fire baptism we got a couple of hard boiled ninjas that were able to firefight anything and the vendor team was sent back home, with praises.

No ROI for us. The company I work for has no business approach to BI strategy. All we, as a company care, is to make the customer happy and that has the cost of not letting us turn down some unprofiting projects. So, Pentaho is a good tool and capable of delivering millions of dollars on new/recouped/saved revenue, but we are not posing for that.

Thinking a bit more, the mere fact we are able to deliver more, and hence take more orders, might be seem as a return on our investment. Yet I can't exact a number, for even this kind of return is a little unclear.

Pentaho is cheap, and becomes cheaper as your team master it. However, it would be a total waste of good dollars to believe my word. Try it for free and go look for professional support from Pentaho. You can also try to compare other tools with Pentaho, but keep in mind that, appart from SAS, all other tools compete on a part of Pentaho. So you must assembly a set of different products to fully compare to it.

Let us say you are going to build a standard dimensional data mart to serve OLAP up. Pentaho has a single price tag, which must be matched to a MicroStrategy PLUS Informatica PowerCenter to make for a correct comparison.

The Community Edition, a free version, is not short on features when compared to the Enterprise Edition, it is just a bit uglier.

To match a Pentaho license price with only either one will give wrong results.

Pentaho was a total unknown product back in 2006-2007. We ran several feature comparison sheets. The biggest and most controversial were against Informatica's PowerCenter and MicroStrategy Intelligent Server. Both were matched with Pentaho at some degree, and few things Pentaho was not able to deliver then. But, and this is a rather strong but, most of the time Pentaho had to be tweaked with to deliver that itens. It was a match, allright, but not a finished product by then.

Since that time the suite has evolved a lot and became more head to head comparable with the same products.

Pentaho has a huge potential to deliver quite a lot of BI value. But on those days when BI is regarded as a simple multidimensional analytics tools, it seems a bit bloated and off the mark. It is so because Pentaho is not aimed to be flashy and eye-pleasing for a commomplace reporting monger (reporting is the farthest you can get from BI and still smell like it), and it requires a bit of strategy to allow for ROI. If you are looking for tools for immediate, prompt, beautifull remmedy, Pentaho might not be your pick. But if you know what you want to acomplish, go on and try it.

• Open Source Community Edition feature - helped us a lot with our budget in the beginning of our project
• Ability to produce different types of visualizations (on par with Tableau) - map, pie, bar, heat map, table etc. Several other different options like exporting to CSV, downloading a table and so on
• Ability to integrate with different databases seamlessly - Hadoop, MySQL etc
• Ability to highly customize the dashboards to the developer's preference.

Helped us form great visualizations at practically no cost since we built end to end open source architecture. This has helped in gaining business insights for us. We have also learned a lot from the development perspective since this is more of a developer's tool than tools like Tableau/Qlikview that are pretty much automated.

We've used it for a year.

Deployment is an issue only if you have a very specific ask of the system.

With a complex and large volume database stability becomes an issue.

With a complex and large volume database scalability becomes an issue.

Pentaho has a good community support - forums.pentaho.com and there are a lot of other forums.

We were using Tableau with not many problems at all. it is a great tool. We switched to Pentaho to help with our budget at that time. Also, for its web application capacity as anyone with the right permissions can access the dashboards with just a link. and they don't need to have a license to access.

It is easily downloadable from the website. Tutorials are available on YouTube for installation of Pentaho, but it becomes difficult when your requirements are specific, such as the incorporation of Hadoop, when there is no tutorial available for that. Also, when you encounter a problem, there is not much support you can expect, but a good cloud team can definitely help resolve the installation issues.

It's an in-house one. It is easily downloadable/install-able but not very easily customize-able. We had a lot of problems before we could have a working version of Pentaho. The JAR files need to be specific. We need people in our team that are good with building VMs/cloud computing for implementing the server version of pentaho. We cannot ignore the importance of a maintenance team to cope up with any on going problems (you would like to expect a bunch).

I know that price is very high for Pentaho Enterprise Edition. I think it's $250,000 per year. It's worth it only if you need a web application with features like that of Tableau's. If you are to buy something, I would suggest Tableau. It depends on your needs and how you plan to collect the data, but if you will be able to manage with the features that are available in Community Edition, then Pentaho is a good option.

We chose Pentaho over five other Big Data supporting BI solutions.

Research it and know your needs.

Transformations. The wide range of transformations that are available in product suite, enable me to do data cleaning, transformation and mapping. I have used Pentaho mostly for ETL purposes.

Pentaho was used for data massaging in a system integration project. It enabled seamless data movement from one system to another. The biggest advantage of using this tool was that it support a wide range of input and output formats

Debugging and logging needs to improve. Not all the time debugging gives the accurate picture of what is going wrong with the jobs or transformations.

I've been using it for one year.

We've had no issues deploying it.

It's been stable.

Data type mismatch issues causes a lot of error in the transformations, which I believe at times make it difficult to scale. For example in many transformations you have to mention the data type of the data and if the input file changes the data type, these transformation also needs to be updated. Hence one data type change in the input file have cascading effects

I've never had to use it, but they do have a strong online community.

There was no previous solution in place.

It was straightforward, as there was not much of configuration was involved.

I was the vendor team who implemented this solution for the client.

It's difficult to predict the ROI as it was just a component of the system.

The tool is easy to implement, but it needs technical acumen to do so. In other words although it look like a simple drag and drop kind of tool, it can be fairly complex.

The data integration feature is the most valuable feature for us.

We've used Pentaho since 2007 in many open source business intelligence projects.

The dashboards and reports could use more improvement to show more data and to provide more analysis.

We've used it since 2007.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We haven't had any issues with stability.

We haven't had any issues with scalability.

It's straightforward and we haven't really encountered complexities in the initial setup that we can't handle.

Pentaho Business Analytics platform overall is an outstanding product that offers great cost saving solutions for companies of all sizes. The Pentaho Business Analytics platform is built on top of several underlying open source projects driven by the community’s contributions. There are several features that I find invaluable and with each release, improvements are made.

The Pentaho User Console provides a portal for users that makes it easy for users to explore information interactively. Dashboard Reporting, scheduling jobs, and managing data connections are some of the features that are made easy with the console. For more advanced users you can extend Pentaho Analyzer with custom visualizations or create reporting solutions with Ctools. The Marketplace empowers the community to develop new and innovative plugins and simplifies the installation process of the plugins for the users of the console. The plugin framework provides a plugin contributor that extends the core services offered by the BI Server.

Pentaho Data Integration (Spoon) is also another valuable tool for development. Spoon delivers powerful extraction, transformation, and load capabilities using a Metadata approach. The Data Integration graphical drag and drop design is easy for new users to follow and can increase productivity. More advanced users can extend Pentaho Data Integration creating transformations and jobs dynamically.

My company was able to reduce software costs and hire additional staff given the cost savings that Pentaho provided. We are moving towards a Hadoop environment after the migration of our current ETL processes and Pentaho’s easy to use development tools and big data analytics capabilities were a factor in choosing Pentaho as a solution.

For those that run the open source community edition at times it can be difficult to find updated references for support. Even for companies that use the Enterprise Edition finding useful resources when a problem occurs can be difficult. Pentaho driven best practices should be made available to both the Community and Enterprise users to motivate and empower more users to use the solutions effectively.

Pentaho has stellar support services with extremely intelligent Pentaho and Hitachi consultants all over the world. Those support services and documentation are made available to Enterprise clients that have purchased the Enterprise Edition and have access to the support portal.

Pentaho is easy to deploy, easy to use and maintain. It’s low cost and a fully supported business intelligence solution. I have used Pentaho in small and large organizations with great success.

Enterprise licenses can be paid for the Enterprise Pentaho full service solution which offers support through the portal and access to Pentaho/Hitachi Consultants for additional costs.

Pentaho offers a community edition which is an open source solution and can be downloaded for free. The community edition truly gives most companies everything they need but your solution needs are matched with your business needs. As a cost cutting option Enterprise license fees can be paid to vendors to fund in demand support.

My company embeds the following features into our product -

• BI server
• Analyzer report
• Interactive report
• Dashboard

We can demonstrate a better report UI and vivid experience for our customers.

The OEM license pricing is quite expensive. Enhance the authentication and authorization part.

We've been using the BA Server Enterprise Edition for three years.

Most of our customers have a complex authentication environment. Our customers found it difficult to configure flexibly.

There were no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues scaling it.

7/10

7/10

It's kind of complex if user wants to implement LDAP authentication, such as defining the scope and filters.

We implement it ourselves and then embedded it into our product. It’s not easy to separate the different components one needs.

I don't know much, but I have heard that the price is too high.

We are looking for a different solution but have not determined one yet.

It’s a comprehensive BA tool including ETL and reporting. It’s easy to use with a small dataset, but you will need to dig deep to optimize the performance when the data set is huge.

• Spoon
• Schema work bench
• CDE dashboards
• Client budget

• License cost has come down
• Easy maintenance

It's not flexible for an enterprise database.

I've used it for four and a half years.

Deployment is easy but upgrading is an issue.

There are no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with scaling it.

7/10

7/10

I found Pentaho Data Integration the most valuable component since it is the most mature open-source ETL tool available. Compared to other proprietary products it has a less steep learning curve due to it's very intuitive user interface. Besides that it has a pluggable architecture which makes it quite easy to extend with custom functionality and features.

Another thing worth mentioning is the very active user community around the products which provide some great resources for community support.

As for the data integration part each development team were writing their own integration scripts, parsers and interfaces from scratch on each different project over and over again. With Pentaho Data Integration which offers all these common tasks out-of-the-box we reduced development time significantly. Also by using such a universal tool and introducing a uniform architecture it became a lot easier for our developers to switch and/or join between the different development projects.

Also on the business intelligence part we moved from developing custom solutions on each track to the usage of standard functionality of the BI server and thus cutting down both complexity and development time.

Since most of our projects start off as a proof-of-concept with the Community Edition version of the products we found that the differences between the Community- and the Enterprise Editions are too big on certain levels. It would be a big gain if the Community Edition version would be a full representation of the Enterprise Editions making it easier to move on to the Enterprise Edition and support.

I started using Pentaho Data Integration around seven years ago and moved on to the full stack about five years ago.

I have seen many different (custom build) deployment solutions for Pentaho throughout the years each having their own pros and cons.

We've had no issues with its stability.

Since Pentaho supports running as a single process to a clustered architecture and has a big focus on big data (distributed) environments, scalability hasn't been an issue for us.

The open source strategy of Pentaho has resulted in a very active community which provided us all the support we need. Compared to other big vendors my personal experience is that response times are a lot shorter.

Most of our previously used solutions were custom built. We have evaluated both open-source and proprietary competitive products but found that Pentaho was the easiest to adopt.

Depending upon the solutions nature, the initial setup for a basic data warehouse architecture is quite straightforward. But as with all solutions as the landscape grows and user requirements evolve, the complexity increases. I think that Pentaho suits well in today's demand for a continuous integration approach. With this in mind the initial setup is crucial in a way not to find yourself spending a lot of time and effort in refactoring the complete solution over-and-over again.

We implemented it in-house. Keep your development and implementation cycles short and small if possible. Users demand fast implementation of requirements so the continuous integration approach becomes more crucial as well as self-service functionality. From which the latter is not yet the strongest use-case for using Pentaho yet.

Decrease of development time compared to our traditional development cycles in pure Enterprise JAVA solutions should be estimated around 60%.

Unfortunately I can't provide any exact figures about this. But using the Community edition for the development and test cycles drops down the licensing costs for the complete OTAP street.

As mentioned before, there is a great community of users, developers and other enthusiasts which I recommend to consult for your particular use-case. Check the latest Gartner report (2016) about BI vendors and ultimately visit one of the Pentaho Community Meetups to get more insight.