Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Reviews

Its ability of blending data and the dashboarding with C*TOOLS for creating responsive single page apps.

We have been able to expose data services through the use of CDA relying on the same database as the reporting tools, thus avoiding inconsistencies among the data shown by reports and data acquired by external systems.

The User Console, aka workspace, and the development of dashboards. They work but they require some programmer skills. This means a continous application management on behalf of IT dept.

I've used it for six years.

There were issues, but they were solved with help from tech support.

There were issues, but they were solved with help from tech support.

There were issues, but they were solved with help from tech support.

It depends, as it takes usually a long time, and some answers are just a way to acquire time and the commitment seems poor. However, when you finally get to an engineer your are likely to have your problem solved in a few days.

We used Microstrategy, Cognos, and Business Objects. The pricing was the key driver, but also the open source licensing which made us think we would have been able to develop on our own improvements. This didn't happen because primarily of the few resources we effectively put on development.

It's complex because of the lack of documentation and the absence of an installer for Linux.

We did it in-house one, and we had to hire some developers for some months with Java skills.

Have a vision, and do not let yourself be guided by the technology.

The best benefit of the product is that it is easy to use and to understand.

We have a huge amount of data that needs to be cleaned and made more valuable for our organization. This Data Integration helps us to achieve that goal.

I have used multiple versions of this product. The initial version we were on was v3.2 and we were had multiple issues, but currently don't find any issues as a blocker. In general, it would be good if we could get better performance from this product.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We haven't had any issues with stability except for those described in the Areas for Improvement.

We haven't had any issues with scalability.

There are other products out there, but I feel that this is the best one.

It is extremely flexible, it allows you to use variables/parameters for just about everything. 

It enables us to automate our reporting and ETL to a very high extent.

The product itself is great, the biggest downside in my opinion is that it is hard to find (hire) people with expertise. Our experience with Pentaho software is that few people have the required expertise. Hiring additional resources for projects can be tough.

Our solution is that we tend to train our own people, it’s definitely not hard to learn, basically anyone with SQL knowledge and experience in another tool can learn using Pentaho Data Integration very easily, but you might end up training them yourselves.

We had no issues with the deployment.

There was no issues with the stability.

We had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Train your own people!

• Best in performance in both hosted and local environments
• Best open source warehouse solution using the Kimball method
• Best Big Data discovery components and BI
• Simple and easy to understand and work with
• Complete cost effective solutions
• Best support in forums
• Best visualizations in the market - Protovis & D3
• Best custom interactivity features
• Best product for embedded BI
• Best for mobile responsive technology integrated, i.e. bootstrap
• Best support in forums
• Best documentation - Open API's

• It's reduced our costs
• With self-service we can save time
• Open plug-ins contributors

• Searching repository for reports or dashboards
• Repository UI
• Loading of percentage reports and dashboards

It has a fancy look, the best visualization libraries and is open source. You can get ETL, reporting, analysis, and analytics in a single shop.  Small, mid sized and enterprises such as CA have been implementing Pentaho. 

I would say that user-defined class operator is currently very valuable to me. Other than that native connectivity to hadoop (MapR), analytical databases and enterprise systems are really important to me these days.

I am a researcher in the field of data integration, and I am using this tool as a sandbox. I would say, because it is open source and high availability of forums and support has made my work really easy. Also, the reporting and analysis functionality provided gives me more freedom to test my test cases and results.

I would like to have more languages/scripts supported in user-defined classes. Right now the options are very limited. I know, if I want to do core programming I can always import my classes/jars into it, but it would be really nice to have more functionality in terms of programming language and support in UD classes/operator. Besides that, different parallel algorithms/skeletons would be great. For example, it could suggest which parallel algorithm I should use on a particular operator or a set of operators. It would be really cool to have such a functionality.

 If you are looking to integrate unstructured or semi-structured datasets with some parallelization, choose this tool. Parallelization supported by Pentaho Data Integration is a functionality that is really nice to have . You can choose which activities you want to parallelize and that's it. You do not have to write parallel code or something, as it does this job for you, which is awesome for a not so good programmer such as myself.

• It has a nice GUI that anyone can learn to use in just a few days with minimal training.
• It has great support for big data technologies; Pentaho 5.3 comes with support for HBase, Pig, Oozie, and Hadoop distribution support.

• It's an open-source tool, so you don't need to worry about licensing costs.
• We've deployed it with very minimal hardware.
• We have migrated one of the key project from Microsoft BI to Pentaho Data integration, this saved lot of money as well there were much improvement in performance as well.

The rule executor step can be improved. It has one limitation: we cannot give it a dynamic file name in this step.

I've used it for 4.5 years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

We used MSBI and we switched to Pentaho Data Integration and it has saved us lot of money and time.

For Pentaho, the initial setup is very straightforward.

We did it in-house.

Because it's open source, there's no issue of pricing or licensing.

Use if for any data warehousing and migration projects. I love this tool and we can use it without spending a penny.

I would say this is the best ETL tool in the market, considering this is open source and ease to use, very nice GUI.

Data transformation within Pentaho is a nice feature that they have and that I value.

Integration between databases and data import for a BI solution.

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.

There were no issues with the deployment.

Until now, the stability of Pentaho is great. I've already tested various scenarios and I didn't feel a loss of performance.

There have been no issues so far in scaling the product.

I used self-learning to implement it and found that the tool is very easy to understand. For some things, I looked at YouTube videos for conceptual ideas during the planning phase.

I did it myself.

• Fast
• Easy to learn and then teach to our team
• It integrates with everything on market

We never used a data integration or BI platform before, and struggled with lots of Excel spreadsheets and CSV files. So when we first used Pentaho to automate a data-integration flow, we were stunned with how fast and how easy it was. We are very productive today thanks to that piece of software integration our data and the platform serving the processed data to our users.

An easier upgrade process for community tools would be nice. They also need to update the ad-hoc reports tool, as the one available is outdated. To get round this, we are using Excel as the output for some reports.

For more then 4 year

Upgrading the bi-platform that is a little pain, but the rest is easy to use and to set-up.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

We use only the community edition, so we only consult the internet for help. There is a strong community of users all over the world. Here in Brazil, the e-mail list is very helpful.

We have performed a lot of setups since we started using Pentaho, and there have been no issues there.