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Board vs Pentaho Business Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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

Board
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
23rd
Ranking in Reporting
20th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Business Performance Management (10th)
Pentaho Business Analytics
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
20th
Ranking in Reporting
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Operations Analytics (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Board is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Business Analytics is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user196212 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 06, 2016
 

Featured Reviews

Wiboon Thabsuwan - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use and requires less time to learn or understand its features
I think the product is good in terms of ease of use. The interface looks really nice and very easy to use. Every command appears in the icon. It looks like you don't have to understand everything about the command. You do not necessarily have to know more, or I would say that there is less time for our study about the products. Functionality-wise, it is quite easy to use and requires less time to understand or learn about the product. I am a software vendor, so I do not use the tool myself. I use it for my clients. My clients mostly use it for budgeting and timing purposes. I would say that's really less maintenance at all because they can do everything by themselves. It is good in terms of ease of use.
Sayan König - PeerSpot reviewer
Flexible, easy to understand, and simple to set up
The repository should be improved. There should be the possibility to have versioning, to make it combinable with some Git repositories or something like that, to check out the processes and make sure it has a traceable history. The solution could really be improved. There are too many bugs in our version.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"My favourite feature of BOARD is the ability to write back to the OLAP DB, as well as the Rdb, and secure user data allowing databases to be flushed and rebuilt daily."
"It allows people to quickly create dashboards with reports."
"The tool seems to have a lot of ways to handle scaling."
"It has definitely saved us time, especially in our budget and planning processes."
"All the reports are prepared automatically."
"The ability to create a data model and have it in testing within a week is fantastic."
"The drill down is good for people who have that high level view, because they can do some analysis based on it."
"The benefits are getting the data in one spot, the ability to report dynamically, and version control."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"Pentaho is an analytics platform that can be used when an organization has a lot of big data storage systems already installed and needs to manage and analyze that data. It has a specific use case for unstructured data, such as documents, and needs to be able to search and analyze it."
"We were able to install it without any assistance from tech support."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' best features include the ease of developing data flows and the wide range of options to connect to databases, including those on the cloud."
"I use the BI Server, CDE Dashboards, Saiku, and Kettle, because these tools are very good and highly experienced."
"It is robust, offers market intelligence, and utilizes modules effectively."
"The most valuable feature of Pentaho is the Tableau report."
"Easy to use components to create the job."
 

Cons

"​My analysts have used the technical support. Sometimes they have felt like they did not receive the answer that they needed, or you have to go and upgrade in order to address a problem. ​"
"I would like to see a better Web client, where the controls work the same way as in the Windows client. I do think that the focus is now on the Web, so it should be improved upon."
"Board's integration could be a bit more robust, but what we have works. If the design isn't right, the flexibility of Board can negatively impact performance."
"​One of the things that I would like to see is the ability to have a rule directly referenced on the cubes.​"
"​We are looking for ways to distinguish zeros versus nulls in BOARD."
"It needs more export to Excel functionality. Right now, we're having to build within the cloud-based platform, as well as build within the Excel add-in, because the export to Excel is somewhat ugly."
"It would be nice to be able to host your site and actually have BOARD be the driver of your site. So you could have anybody in your organization go to www.myorg.com, for example, and then go through what you allow them to go through. So rather than having to go through the application, to be able to go to actually host it to a website."
"Sometimes, the data disappears from the product."
"Another concern is that Pentaho is not customizable or interactive."
"Logging capability is needed."
"Pentaho Business Analytics is hard to learn and not suited for initial users as it requires knowledge of operating systems, Java, and other technical skills."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' user interface is outdated."
"The repository should be improved."
"We did not achieve the ROI. The work delivered to users had lesser value than the subscription cost."
"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."
"Deployment is not simple. It is not simple because we are dealing with a lot of data; we are dealing with a lot of storage. So, it's not a simple process."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is quite expensive, if it is made cheaper then we can have more clients. I rate it four out of ten."
"The tool's price is a bit high compared to other solutions."
"Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support."
"It is not the cheapest product on earth, but you get so much. It provides good value for money."
"​In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us."
"We were lucky enough to find a Pentaho OEM partner who offered a data warehouse model and the ETL software for about 60K SGD per year."
"Pentaho is expensive ."
"Free and commercial versions are available."
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Comparison Review

it_user6978 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 10, 2013
Jaspersoft vs. Pentaho – Which one to use & is there any need to purchase the commercial edition
Any company (be it technology, manfucaturing, human resource, ecommerce, SME etc) always has the need for Business Intelligence to some or the other extent. If cost is one of the consideration factor, then the 2 BI tools which are at the forefront are Pentaho and Jaspersoft. But, often the same…
 

Answers from the Community

it_user196212 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 6, 2016
Oct 6, 2016
Bruce, have you made a decision about which solution is the best fit for your needs? I would love to hear your feedback.
2 out of 49 answers
it_user165072 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 17, 2015
I'd recommend they look at Sisense.... Pentaho takes a ton of expertise and time. Board is really limited in terms of data magnitude, blending and the visulaziations aren't that great and Birst has huge performance issues, especially when taking concurrency into account. It's also overly expensive as well. http://www.sisense.com/embedded-analytics/
Sep 17, 2015
Hi, We have been using Pentaho as our primary BI Solution as an OEM for clients on our ERP Solutions, and have found it to be the most cost effective and user friendly of the BI Products we identified. On our scaled implementations, with 500+ users, we utilise HP Vertica for our Data Warehouse and we have not had any major speed issues at this scale Regards, Aadil Aboobaker Brainbug
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
13%
Educational Organization
7%
Real Estate/Law Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Is Board better than Anaplan as a Business Intelligence (BI) solution?
We've had several FP&A departments include Anaplan in their analytics discussions, and while BI information IS generated, the focus is generally on compiling input from various sources and simu...
What do you like most about Board?
All the reports are prepared automatically.
What needs improvement with Board?
Some of my company's customers are interested to see the predictive analytics part of the tool. Some customers would like to leverage or prioritize predictive analytics as the main feature, but som...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pentaho Business Analytics?
Pentaho Business Analytics is priced similarly to other competitors such as QlikView ( /products/qlikview-reviews ) and Tableau ( /products/tableau-reviews ). I usually use the community edition.
What needs improvement with Pentaho Business Analytics?
Pentaho Business Analytics ( /categories/bi-business-intelligence-tools ) is hard to learn and not suited for initial users as it requires knowledge of operating systems, Java, and other technical ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Coca-Cola, Puma, Desigual, Ricoh, KPMG, H&M, Groupe SEB
Cargo 2000 Lufthansa, Marketo, ModCloth, Cardiac Science, Telefonica, ExactTarget, Active Broadband Networks, and Brussels Airport.
Find out what your peers are saying about Board vs. Pentaho Business Analytics and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.