Fivetran vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

Fivetran and Hitachi Vantara are both solutions in the Data Integration category. Fivetran is ranked #12 with an average rating of 7.9, while Hitachi Vantara is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.7. Fivetran holds a 2.1% mindshare in DI, compared to Hitachi Vantara’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Fivetran users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

Fivetran

Read 25 Fivetran reviews

3,430 Views
2,417 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Read 53 Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics reviews

2,136 Views
1,031 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Fivetran

Pentaho Data Integration an...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Pentaho Data Integration and Fivetran are both prominent tools in the data integration category. Fivetran may have the upper hand due to its simplicity and ease of integration as highlighted in various comparisons.

Features: Pentaho Data Integration offers a robust graphical user interface and supports a wide range of data sources, including big data technologies. With drag-and-drop functionality, it enables users, even with minimal programming knowledge, to quickly execute data transformations. Fivetran excels in providing automated data pipelines and real-time data synchronization. Its integration capabilities are facilitated through pre-built connectors, reducing the need for extensive development work. Both tools have strong points in ensuring efficient data management, with Pentaho appealing to users who prefer flexibility and community-driven support, while Fivetran is suited for those seeking straightforward implementation.

Room for Improvement: Pentaho's performance with large data volumes could benefit from enhancements, specifically in logging and documentation. There is also a need for better support for Hadoop utilities and improvements in user-defined classes. Fivetran requires greater customization options and improved visibility into data pipelines. Lower pricing models could be more attractive to its users, alongside a demand for more comprehensive logging and faster development of new connectors.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pentaho provides flexible deployment options across on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, though it might necessitate more technical skills for deployment. Its community offers extensive support compensating for less formal backing. Fivetran facilitates seamless cloud and hybrid cloud deployments with strong automation, benefiting users with its more organized and responsive support system.

Pricing and ROI: Pentaho’s Community Edition presents an attractive cost-benefit for cost-conscious organizations, although its enterprise version can become expensive with increased usage. Conversely, while Fivetran's services may come at a higher price, the cost is justified by efficient integrations and lower maintenance requirements. Its scalable pricing based on data volume is especially appealing to larger enterprises with significant data needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Fivetran vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fivetran vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

February 2025

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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

Fivetran

Ranking in Data Integration

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Replication (3rd), Cloud Data Integration (8th)

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Ranking in Data Integration

22nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Fivetran is 2.1%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.4%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Erik Jones

Head of BI and Analytics at HyperScience

Solution reduces time-to-value; high ROI

Fivetran has room for improvement in data pipeline observability. The Fivetran logs are fairly basic, compared to, for example, the insight Fivetran gives into helping users understanding the performance of data pipelines. So I think their observability into the pipeline itself could be improved. In addition, Fivetran is in the very early stages of allowing other companies to access its metadata API, but that's something that could use improvement, and I know that they're working on right now. We use a separate tool for "reverse ETL", which is the opposite of what Fivetran does; it pushes data from your data warehouse back out to business applications. If Fivetran pulls data from those same applications, they should also enable users to push it back. I would love to do both ETL and reverse ETL in the same tool. It would be nice if Fivetran offered both their regular offering plus the reverse ETL option as well.

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Ryan Ferdon

Senior Data Engineer at Burgiss

Low-code makes development faster than with Python, but there were caching issues

If you're working with a larger data set, I'm not so sure it would be the best solution. The larger things got the slower it was. It was kind of buggy sometimes. And when we ran the flow, it didn't go from a perceived start to end, node by node. Everything kicked off at once. That meant there were times when it would get ahead of itself and a job would fail. That was not because the job was wrong, but because Pentaho decided to go at everything at once, and something would process before it was supposed to. There were nodes you could add to make sure that, before this node kicks off, all these others have processed, but it was a bit tedious. There were also caching issues, and we had to write code to clear the cache every time we opened the program, because the cache would fill up and it wouldn't run. I don't know how hard that would be for them to fix, or if it was fixed in version 10. Also, the UI is a bit outdated, but I'm more of a fan of function over how something looks. One other thing that would have helped with Pentaho was documentation and support on the internet: how to do things, how to set up. I think there are some sites on how to install it, and Pentaho does have a help repository, but it wasn't always the most useful.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The portal is very intuitive and easy to use."

"The ease of setting up the connectors and transformations is highly valuable."

"The user interface is mostly UI-based, eliminating the need for a lot of coding."

"The simplicity and scalability are the strongest features of Fivetran."

"The product has some seamless connectors, which are readily available."

"Making the decision to implement Fivetran was supported by the fact that they have better connectors than other competitors."

"It is easy for users to get accustomed to the tool due to its gentle learning curve and clear error transparency."

"Its arrays are powerful enough to handle migrations even when the replication is happening in the background, without causing any trouble with the ongoing traffic."

More Fivetran pros

"The area where Lumada has helped us is in the commercial area. There are many extractions to compose reports about our sales team performance and production steps. Since we are using Lumada to gather data from each industry in each country. We can get data from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Colombia at the same time. We can then concentrate and consolidate it in only one place, like our data warehouse. This improves our production performance and need for information about the industry, production data, and commercial data."

"It makes it pretty simple to do some fairly complicated things. Both I and some of our other BI developers have made stabs at using, for example, SQL Server Integration Services, and we found them a little bit frustrating compared to Data Integration. So, its ease of use is right up there."

"The product is user-friendly and intuitive"

"Pentaho Data Integration is easy to use, especially when transforming data."

"It's my understanding that the product can scale."

"We use Lumada’s ability to develop and deploy data pipeline templates once and reuse them. This is very important. When the entire pipeline is automated, we do not have any issues in respect to deployment of code or with code working in one environment but not working in another environment. We have saved a lot of time and effort from that perspective because it is easy to build ETL pipelines."

"I absolutely love Hitachi. I'm one of the forefront supporters of Hitachi for my firm. It's so easy to integrate within our environments. In terms of being able to quickly build ETL jobs, transform, and then automate them, it's really easy to integrate throughout for data analytics."

"Flexible deployment, in any environment, is very important to us. That is the key reason why we ended up with these tools. Because we have a very highly secure environment, we must be able to install it in multiple environments on multiple different servers. The fact that we could use the same tool in all our environments, on-prem and in the cloud, was very important to us."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pros

Cons

"More connectors are needed for exotic, popular, and rising star portals."

"The documentation is decent, but it's hard to find information online about Fivetran. For example, if you try to search for an error code, you won't find much information about it in forums."

"Some of the pain points we're looking at are trying to integrate some of the items in the Microsoft stack, so SharePoint and Excel, and then some of the newer Azure services."

"The biggest area for improvement is in customization, particularly in how Fivetran socializes its tools."

"I would like for them to incorporate additional transformations. A valuable aspect of the product is that it does inflight transformations and that could be expanded."

"There is not a lot of options to customize the pipeline, and the cost is high."

"I would like to see an improvement in the support offered by Fivetran."

"There was a random change to our contract in a unilateral manner after the first year. The overall cost of using Fivetran was then unclear and this is the reason I would not recommend this solution."

More Fivetran cons

"If you're working with a larger data set, I'm not so sure it would be the best solution. The larger things got the slower it was."

"While Pentaho Data Integration is very friendly, it is not very useful when there isn't a lot of data to handle."

"The web interface is rusty, and the biggest problem with Pentaho is debugging and troubleshooting. It isn't easy to build the pipeline incrementally. At least in our case, it's hard to find a way to execute step by step in the debugging mode."

"Its basic functionality doesn't need a whole lot of change. There could be some improvement in the consistency of the behavior of different transformation steps. The software did start as open-source and a lot of the fundamental, everyday transformation steps that you use when building ETL jobs were developed by different people. It is not a seamless paradigm. A table input step has a different way of thinking than a data merge step."

"Although it is a low-code solution with a graphical interface, often the error messages that you get are of the type that a developer would be happy with. You get a big stack of red text and Java errors displayed on the screen, and less technical people can get intimidated by that. It can be a bit intimidating to get a wall of red error messages displayed. Other graphical tools that are focused at the power user level provide a much more user-friendly experience in dealing with your exceptions and guiding the user into where they've made the mistake."

"I would like to see more improvements with AS400 DB2."

"The performance could be improved. If they could have analytics perform well on large volumes, that would be a big deal for our products."

"I could not connect to our Hadoop environment in an easy and flexible way, and it was important to scale our data warehouse."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing model is okay and mid to large companies will not have an issue with it."

"I don't have the exact information, but I know it is high, and it is on a yearly basis. There is no additional cost for what we're doing. We're always open to doing things cheaper, so we might potentially implement a different solution."

"The product is reasonably expensive"

"The licensing costs are extremely high for the usage of somebody who has one GB or two GB of usage per day for real-time traffic. There are many other players in the market which are similarly priced or competitively priced. On average per month, it used to come around 12,000-15,000 USD, which is very high."

"I've heard that the license for HVR is a bit costly compared to its competitors, but since it's reliable and efficient, I think the customer shouldn't be bothered about the cost."

"The solution is affordable."

"In the first year, we were given a very good discount. It was approximately 20,000 Euros per year. In the third year, we purchased credit for two years and the price was 33,000 Euros per year."

"I would say they're a little bit on the expensive side, and their contract process is not particularly good, but there is a lot of potential flexibility."

More Fivetran pricing and cost advice

"There is a good open source option (Community Edition)."

"When we first started with it, it was much cheaper. It has gone up drastically, especially since Hitachi bought out Pentaho."

"The solution reduced our ETL development time by a lot because a whole project used to take about a month to get done previously. After having Lumada, it took just a week. For a big company in Brazil, it saves a team at least $10,000 a month."

"Sometimes we provide the licenses or the customer can procure their own licenses. Previously, we had an enterprise license. Currently, we are on a community license as this is adequate for our needs."

"It does seem a bit expensive compared to the serverless product offering. Tools, such as Server Integration Services, are "almost" free with a database engine. It is comparable to products like Alteryx, which is also very expensive."

"I think Lumada's price is fair compared to some of the others, like BusinessObjects, which is was the other thing that I used at my previous job. BusinessObject's price was more reasonable before SAP acquired it. They jacked the price up significantly. Oracle's OBIEE tool was also prohibitively expensive."

"We did a two or three-year deal the last time we did it. As compared to other solutions, at least so far in our experience, it has been very affordable. The licensing is by component. So, you need to make sure you only license the components that you really intend to use. I am not sure if we have relicensed after the Hitachi acquisition, but previously, multi-year renewals resulted in a good discount. I'm not sure if this is still the case. We've had the full suite for a lot of years, and there is just the initial cost. I am not aware of any additional costs."

"I use it because it is free. I download from their page for free. I don't have to pay for a license. With other tools, I have to pay for the licenses. That is why I use Pentaho."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

26%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What's the deal with the HVR software acquisition?

As a user of HVR Software I followed this deal closely. Fivetran is apparently trying to establish more in its sector and by buying an already established data replication software, they become som...

See all answers

Does HVR Software provide reliable insights?

I honestly can't think of another data replication software that can give you better statistics and insight than HVR Software. There's the feature for topology and statistics and both of them can ...

See all answers

How much traffic can HVR Software handle?

As someone who works at a company where a high volume of information is replicated and has tried several data replication softwares, I can tell you that you're looking at the right one. HVR Softwar...

See all answers

Which ETL tool would you recommend to populate data from OLTP to OLAP?

Hi Rajneesh, yes here is the feature comparison between the community and enterprise edition : https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/pdf/brochure/leverage-open-source-benefits-with-assurance-of-hita...

See all answers

What do you think can be improved with Hitachi Lumada Data Integrations?

In my opinion, the reporting side of this tool needs serious improvements. In my previous company, we worked with Hitachi Lumada Data Integration and while it does a good job for what it’s worth, ...

See all answers

What do you use Hitachi Lumada Data Integrations for most frequently?

My company has used this product to transform data from databases, CSV files, and flat files. It really does a good job. We were most satisfied with the results in terms of how many people could us...

See all answers

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Compared 11% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fivetran

March 2025

Download Fivetran product report

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

March 2025

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics report

Download Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics product report

Also Known As

No data available

Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration

Overview

Fivetran, the global leader in data movement, is trusted by companies like OpenAI, LVMH, Pfizer, Verizon and Spotify to centralize data from SaaS applications, databases, files, and other sources into cloud destinations, including data lakes. With high-performance pipelines, seamless interoperability, and enterprise-grade security, Fivetran empowers organizations to modernize their data infrastructure, power analytics and AI, ensure compliance, and achieve transformative business outcomes. Learn more at Fivetran.com

Fivetran

Pentaho Data Integration stands as a versatile platform designed to cater to the data integration and analytics needs of organizations, regardless of their size. This powerful solution is the go-to choice for businesses seeking to seamlessly integrate data from diverse sources, including databases, files, and applications. Pentaho Data Integration facilitates the essential tasks of cleaning and transforming data, ensuring it's primed for meaningful analysis. With a wide array of tools for data mining, machine learning, and statistical analysis, Pentaho Data Integration empowers organizations to glean valuable insights from their data. What sets Pentaho Data Integration apart is its maturity and a vibrant community of users and developers, making it a reliable and cost-effective option. Pentaho Data Integration offers a range of features, including a comprehensive ETL toolkit, data cleaning and transformation capabilities, robust data analysis tools, and seamless deployment options for data integration and analytics solutions, making it a go-to solution for organizations seeking to harness the power of their data.

Hitachi Vantara

Sample Customers

Autodesk, Condé Nast, JetBlue, Morgan Stanley, OpenAI, LVMH, Pfizer, Verizon, SpotifyNational Australia Bank, Saks, Cemex, Okta, Dropbox, Pitney Bowes, World Fuel Services,Lufthansa, AutoZone, ASICS, ASOS, Coupa, Databricks, Hermes, New Relic, Intercom,Canva, Honeywell, Square, DocuSign, Nandos, Oldcastle Infrastructure

66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute

Buyer's Guide

Fivetran vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

February 2025

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