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IBM App Connect vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
IBM App Connect enhances ROI and operational efficiency with integration, requiring skilled personnel for optimal long-term benefits.
Sentiment score
7.9
Pentaho offers cost-effective integration, reducing ETL time, lowering expenses, and enhancing competitiveness with open-source flexibility and efficiency.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.6
IBM App Connect's customer support is mostly praised, with effective escalation, though first-tier and onsite assistance require improvement.
Sentiment score
5.2
Users rely on community support over customer service due to mixed experiences, despite responsive technical support and Hitachi's involvement.
The technical support from IBM is good.
Communication with the vendor is challenging
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
IBM App Connect is praised for scalability and flexibility, despite some challenges with Hypervisor Edition and XML payload sizes.
Sentiment score
7.3
Pentaho excels in scalability and efficient data handling but faces challenges with exceptionally large data and complex growth scenarios.
I would rate the scalability of IBM App Connect as nine out of ten.
Pentaho Data Integration handles larger datasets better.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
IBM App Connect is praised for stability, with rare issues quickly resolved, maintaining high user satisfaction and performance.
Sentiment score
7.1
Pentaho Data Integration offers reliability for small to midsize operations but may lag and freeze with complex uses.
It's pretty stable, however, it struggles when dealing with smaller amounts of data.
 

Room For Improvement

IBM App Connect needs better logging, support, connectors, UI, command line integration, and simpler installation to address user concerns.
Pentaho needs improvements in big data performance, error handling, UI, scheduling, backward compatibility, cloud integration, and Python support.
I find it particularly good for on-premises and now cloud use.
Pentaho Data Integration is very friendly, it is not very useful when there isn't a lot of data to handle.
 

Setup Cost

IBM App Connect pricing is high, dependent on volume and status, yet offers flexibility and quality justifying its cost.
Pentaho offers a cost-effective solution with its free Community Edition and affordable subscription-based Enterprise Edition for varying needs.
 

Valuable Features

IBM App Connect offers user-friendly integration with minimal coding, scalability, and security, supporting complex environments and efficient automation.
Pentaho provides an intuitive, open-source platform for efficient ETL development and data integration with minimal coding and broad compatibility.
The features I find most valuable are message routing, message transformation, and protocol translation.
I find the drag and drop feature in Pentaho Data Integration very useful for integration.
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM App Connect
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (11th)
Pentaho Data Integration an...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (22nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Mehdi El Filahi - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers flexible adapters, good scalability but logging can be difficult at times
There is room for improvement in the logging messages. Sometimes, if you put someone new into App Connect, they can abandon it the same day. The logging is really painful. However, IBM has made efforts to integrate with Elasticsearch for logging, so that's an improvement. Overall, the logging can be difficult at times. One more important point is that if IBM improves its CI/CD capabilities, it will make a big difference. Right now, I have to create my own CI/CD setup from scratch for every client, which is inefficient. Back in 2013, I worked with Sonic ESB, and even then, it had CI/CD with Maven. With App Connect, you need to build everything yourself when using tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, or CircleCI. IBM really needs to provide official support for this.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
48%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM App Connect?
I like the adapters. The adapters help us achieve scalability. If you want to connect to SAP, there's an adapter. Salesforce? There's an adapter. You want to connect to another system? There's like...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM App Connect?
IBM App Connect's pricing is high compared to other products.
What is your primary use case for IBM App Connect?
I have been using IBM App Connect for application integration.
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

IBM Cast Iron
Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

United Way of Allegheny County, Saint-Gobain CPS, Ricoh, SunTrust Banks Inc.
66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM App Connect vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.