Pentaho Business Analytics Reviews

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.

Pentaho Data Integration - Even though this is the community edition it is very powerful compared to other expensive products like MS SQL, SSIS, or Informatica.

We were able to configure our data warehouse and implement more than eight data cubes in a very short period of time.

It needs to improve scheduling for the integration aspect. Pentaho Mondrian (cubes) should allow snowflake schemas

We've been using the follow tools within Pentaho for two years.

Pentaho Data Integration - 5.3.0.0-213
Pentaho Aggregation Designer 2008-2012
Pentaho Schema Workbench 3.6.1
Pentaho User Console (Mondrian) 5.4.0.1.130

We had no deployment issues.

We had no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues scaling it.

We haven't used tech support, but the forums are an excellent source of help.

I have used Microsoft and Informatica. We chose Pentaho because it is an open source.

I believe the software installation (client or server) is very straightforward.
However, complexity occurs when tuning properties for the Mondrian cubes.

We did an in-house implementation, as it was fully customized.

Pentaho is a good choice for Unix/Linux environments. The integration tool is quite good. The configuration for cubes is quite simple (XML) and it is very simple to configure dimensions, factual and calculated data. although, we use a Mondrian emulator (Sinatra) for our solution implementation.

We use both DataStage and Pentaho, but I don't see any special features in Pentaho that is not available in DataStage, except Big Data plugins and connectors. These are default in Pentaho, and for those who have expertise in Java and Java script can write their custom code or enhance and call from Pentaho's code.

When we wanted pursue this tool, the major factor was the amount of money we could save. Other than that, there is no special use cases for using this product as it was not that matured when we started using it in 2012 when compared to other ETL tools. 

It's still not user friendly or robust enough for our needs.

There were issues with the deployment.

There have been stability issues.

We've had issues scaling it for what we need.

Since there are very few skilled people available on the market, we had to risk the project. 

• Business analytics
• CDE
• Flexible dashboard development
• Cube

I use Pentaho everyday in my company, creating new BI environments for my customers.

The ad-hoc reporting needs to be improved.

There were no deployment issues.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

I've never had to use technical support.

It was easy, and only took a few minutes.

You should always check the community version first as it may be better for you.

Pentaho Business Analytics tool provides ETL. Easy creation of Analyser, interactive & attractive dashboards.

Pentaho BA server is supported by CDE (Common Dashboard Editor) to create responsive Dashboard which can used in Mobile.

Organizing the data & representing data with Graphical view gives an insight on the data.

Mobile Responsiveness of BA server should be improved.

Analyser and interactive Dashboard should be accessible via Dashboard.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been stable for us.

It scales without issues.