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Fivetran vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Fivetran
Ranking in Data Integration
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Data Replication (3rd), Cloud Data Integration (6th)
Pentaho Data Integration an...
Ranking in Data Integration
24th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Fivetran is 2.2%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.5%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Erik Jones - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Ryan Ferdon - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Fivetran offers native connectivity with Sybase"
"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."
"Fivetran can perform data migration incredibly fast, depending on the source and target."
"The ease of usability is the most valuable feature. It's very easy and quick to set up. It also has a central hub as opposed to GoldenGate which is one direct interface. For GoldenGate I would have needed three interfaces whereas with HVR I have a central interface that manages everything."
"The simplicity of the solution is its valuable feature."
"The solution is stable. We've never faced any stability issues."
"The general data ingestion is valuable. It's used for a lot of data. It provides about 90% of the data we use in our data warehouse without needing data engineering."
"Fivetran's most valuable feature is replication."
"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."
"I can use Python, which is open-source, and I can run other scripts, including Linux scripts. It's user-friendly for running any object-based language. That's a very important feature because we live in a world of open-source."
"We also haven't had to create any custom Java code. Almost everywhere it's SQL, so it's done in the pipeline and the configuration. That means you can offload the work to people who, while they are not less experienced, are less technical when it comes to logic."
"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."
"I can create faster instructions than writing with SQL or code. Also, I am able to do some background control of the data process with this tool. Therefore, I use it as an ELT tool. I have a station area where I can work with all the information that I have in my production databases, then I can work with the data that I created."
"Pentaho Data Integration is quite simple to learn, and there is a lot of information available online."
"Pentaho Data Integration is easy to use, especially when transforming data."
"Its drag-and-drop interface lets me and my team implement all the solutions that we need in our company very quickly. It's a very good tool for that."
 

Cons

"The biggest area for improvement is in customization, particularly in how Fivetran socializes its tools."
"Fivetran would be improved by adding the ability to integrate the data from third-party APIs."
"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 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."
"More connectors are needed for exotic, popular, and rising star portals."
"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."
"Fivetran should add more connectors because its competitors, like Airbyte, have more connectors."
"It should have a few more monitoring functionalities."
"I would like to see more improvements with AS400 DB2."
"I would like to see improvement when it comes to integrating structured data with text data or anything that is unstructured. Sometimes we get all kinds of different files that we need to integrate into the warehouse."
"The reporting definitely needs improvement. There are a lot of general, basic features that it doesn't have. A simple feature you would expect a reporting tool to have is the ability to search the repository for a report. It doesn't even have that capability. That's been a feature that we've been asking for since the beginning and it hasn't been implemented yet."
"Parallel execution could be better in Pentaho. It's very simple but I don't think it works well."
"I experience difficulties when handling millions of rows, as the data movement from one source to another becomes challenging."
"Lumada could have more native connectors with other vendors, such as Google BigQuery, Microsoft OneDrive, Jira systems, and Facebook or Instagram. We would like to gather data from modern platforms using Lumada, which is a better approach. As a comparison, if you open Power BI to retrieve data, then you can get data from many vendors with cloud-native connectors, such as Azure, AWS, Google BigQuery, and Athena Redshift. Lumada should have more native connectors to help us and facilitate our job in gathering information from these new modern infrastructures and tools."
"​I work with the Community Edition, therefore I do not have support. There was an issue that I could not resolve with community support.​"
"I was not happy with the Pentaho Report Designer because of the way it was set up. There was a zone and, under it, another zone, and under that another one, and under that another one. There were a lot of levels and places inside the report, and it was a little bit complicated. You have to search all these different places using a mouse, clicking everywhere... each report is coded in a binary file... You cannot search with a text search tool..."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the pricing a six out of ten."
"Fivetran is very expensive, and its database-driven pricing model is outdated."
"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."
"When you have a lot of workflows and complex use cases, pricing goes down as you use it more."
"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."
"The product is reasonably expensive"
"I can't give exact amounts because that's based on usage, but it's more expensive than some of its competitors."
"The solution is affordable."
"When we first started with it, it was much cheaper. It has gone up drastically, especially since Hitachi bought out Pentaho."
"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."
"The pricing has been pretty good. I'm used to using everything open-source or freeware-based. I understand that organizations need to make sure that the solutions are secure, and that's basically where I hit a roadblock in my current organization. They needed to ensure that we had a license and we had a secure way of accessing it so that no outside parties could get access to our data, but in terms of pricing, considering how much other teams are spending on cloud solutions or even their existing solutions, its price point is pretty good. At this time, there are no additional costs. We just have the licensing fees."
"There is a good open source option (Community Edition)​."
"If a company is looking for an ETL solution and wants to integrate it with their tech stack but doesn't want to spend a bunch of money, Pentaho is a good solution"
"You don't need the Enterprise Edition, you can go with the Community Edition. That way you can use it for free and, for free, it's a pretty good tool to use."
"We are using the Community Edition. We have been trying to use and sell the Enterprise version, but that hasn't been possible due to the budget required for it."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
29%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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, ...
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...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

DocuSign, Oldcastle Infrastructure, Crossmedia, Talkdesk, Chubbies, Brandwatch
66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Find out what your peers are saying about Fivetran vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and other solutions. Updated: November 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.