Board vs Pentaho Business Analytics comparison

Board International and Hitachi Vantara are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Board International is ranked #23 with an average rating of 7.5, while Hitachi Vantara is ranked #21 with an average rating of 8.0. Board International holds a 0.5% mindshare in BIT, compared to Hitachi Vantara’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Board International users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Board and Pentaho Business Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Board vs. Pentaho Business Analytics Report (Updated: November 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Board vs. Pentaho Business Analytics

November 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 816,406 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Board is 0.5%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Business Analytics is 0.6%, 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

Vice President - Product Information with 51-200 employees

Oct 06, 2016

Seeking advise on going with Birst, BOARD or Pentaho as an OEM platform solution where we could end up with 1,000's of users over time.

Bruce, have you made a decision about which solution is the best fit for your needs? I would love to hear your feedback.

See all answers

Featured Reviews

Carlos Larrad Salgado

Deputy Director Operations Management Control at Mapfre

Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department

I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality. The user experience is also very important. Cognos is not very easy to understand sometimes, especially when they change the layout but keep the functionality the same. The help is not very graphic and they have no examples. Cognos has to make a big effort to help with understanding the functionality by improving the documentation. There is a lot of documentation, but the examples are hard to find and they should make their help section easier to understand for non-technical users.

Read full review

Wiboon Thabsuwan

Senior Consultant at IMD Company Limited

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.

Read full review

Sayan König

Senior Manager, Financial Services at KPMG

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."

"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."

"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."

"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."

"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."

"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."

"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."

"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."

More IBM Cognos pros

"It is very easy to use. It has got what they call a toolkit, which is a no-code development environment. You can develop a whole solution with it because it is a complete platform. There is a lot of online material that can be used as a reference. You can help yourself while developing a solution. There are some prebuilt applications in the platform environment. You can very easily customize and integrate these applications. It also has flexible scaling of machine resources, which is really great."

"The flexibility and the user-experience are the most valuable features of the solution."

"we are able to easily export data. When directors need financial information, we can go in the system and export the data, then send it out so they have it ready and available. If they are not in the office, we can email it to them. In addition, all the managers are now more on top of their expenses and their budget."

"I think the product is good in terms of ease of use."

"It has a good set of visual elements that you can use and can explain quite well."

"The reporting part has been very valuable as the capabilities of the tool do not have to change graphs, change how grids are displayed, and can create reports on the fly."

"Primary valuable features are its flexibility and versatility and, obviously, functionality goes along with that. Plus, it does that at a small footprint in the file servers, and does it very efficiently."

"Our clients have improved a lot in terms of coordination and communication. This has improved their internal performance."

More Board pros

"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."

"The most valuable feature of Pentaho is the Tableau report."

"We were able to install it without any assistance from tech support."

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

"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."

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."

"Easy to use components to create the job."

Cons

"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."

"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."

"It could have more options for themes."

"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."

"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."

"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."

"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."

"There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos."

More IBM Cognos cons

"Building similar models entirely from scratch could be made quicker with transfer abilities between databases and capsules."

"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."

"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."

"I would like an eLearning platform for BOARD."

"We are looking at ways to improve how we deal with security in BOARD and other similar things. "

"We are looking for ways to distinguish zeros versus nulls in BOARD."

"If we could upload other data, e.g., pivot tables which can be done in BOARD already, that we have pre-existing and have that data distribute to more complex spreadsheets, I would like that going forward."

"It's very powerful, but there is also a big learning curve. It should be a little more intuitive."

More Board cons

"Another concern is that Pentaho is not customizable or interactive."

"Pentaho Business Analytics' user interface is outdated."

"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."

"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."

"Version control would be a good addition."

"We did not achieve the ROI. The work delivered to users had lesser value than the subscription cost."

"The repository should be improved."

"Logging capability is needed."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."

"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."

"I rate the product price as four or five on a scale from one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."

"The cost of IBM Cognos it's more or less the same as most of the other solutions on the market. They're very competitive with the rest of the market and it is not the most expensive product."

"There is a standard license required to use this solution. There are some additional tools but I am not sure if they are an extra cost."

"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."

"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."

"It is quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The tool's price is a bit high compared to other solutions."

"The solution is quite expensive, if it is made cheaper then we can have more clients. I rate it four out of ten."

"Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support."

"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."

"Free and commercial versions are available."

"Pentaho is expensive ."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user6978

Co-Founder at Helical IT Solution (Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Talend, Kettle, DWBI, ETL, Ctools, iReport, Jasper Report)

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…

Read full review

Answers from the Community

it_user196212

Vice President - Product Information with 51-200 employees

Oct 6, 2016

Seeking advise on going with Birst, BOARD or Pentaho as an OEM platform solution where we could end up with 1,000's of users over time.

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

Works with 201-500 employees

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/

Read full answer

it_user141255

Owner

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

Read full answer

See all 49 answers

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

56%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Wholesaler/Distributor

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik ...

See all answers

What do you like most about IBM Cognos?

The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?

I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older version...

See all answers

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 ge...

See all answers

What do you like most about Board?

All the reports are prepared automatically.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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 wou...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pentaho Business Analytics?

The organization has both options based on their needs and budget constraints. The Enterprise Edition is expensive wi...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pentaho Business Analytics?

The product to me is not as user-friendly as other players in the market. It also still needs improvement in the repo...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Power BI vs IBM Cognos

Compared 13% of the time

Tableau vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos

Compared 8% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs IBM Cognos

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Anaplan vs Board

Compared 29% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Board

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Board

Compared 12% of the time

IBM Planning Analytics vs Board

Compared 9% of the time

CCH Tagetik vs Board

Compared 8% of the time

More Board Competitors

KNIME vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 25% of the time

Databricks vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 19% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 16% of the time

SAP Crystal Reports vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 10% of the time

Tableau vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 9% of the time

More Pentaho Business Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

November 2024

Download IBM Cognos product report

Buyer's Guide

Board

November 2024

Download Board product report

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Business Analytics

November 2024

Download Pentaho Business Analytics product report

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

No data available

Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics

Learn More

IBM

Board International

Hitachi Vantara

Overview

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.

IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.

IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:

IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

Reviews from Real Users

IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.

Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”

BOARD International - headquartered in Switzerland - is a leading global provider of software for improving business results through better decision making. By unifying Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management into a single product, BOARD enables companies to achieve a shared vision of their performance across the entire organization, and thus a single version of the truth.

BOARD provides seamless solutions for • Reporting & Analysis • Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting • Profitability Modelling & Optimization • Simulation & What-if-Analysis • Scorecarding & Strategy Management • Financial Consolidation. Based on visual modelling, BOARD has enabled global companies to deploy BI and CPM applications without a single line of code in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions.

Pentaho is an open source business intelligence company that provides a wide range of tools to help their customers better manage their businesses. These tools include data integration software, mining tools, dashboard applications, online analytical processing options, and more.

Pentaho has two product categories: There is the standard enterprise version. This is the product that comes directly from Pentaho itself with all of the benefits, features, and programs that come along with a paid application such us analysis services, dashboard design, and interactive reporting.

The alternative is an open source version, which the public is permitted to add to and tweak the product. This solution has its advantages, aside from the fact that it is free, in that there are many more people working on the project to improve its quality and breadth of functionality.

Sample Customers

More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.

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.

Buyer's Guide

Board vs. Pentaho Business Analytics

November 2024

Free Report: Board vs. Pentaho Business Analytics

Find out what your peers are saying about Board vs. Pentaho Business Analytics and other solutions. Updated: November 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Board vs. Pentaho Business Analytics report.

See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors and best Reporting vendors.

We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.