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KNIME vs Pentaho Business 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

KNIME
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (1st), Data Science Platforms (2nd)
Pentaho Business Analytics
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (19th), Cloud Operations Analytics (4th), Reporting (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. KNIME is designed for Data Mining and holds a mindshare of 24.9%, down 27.1% compared to last year.
Pentaho Business Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 0.5% mindshare, down 0.6% since last year.
Data Mining
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Shyam_Sridhar - PeerSpot reviewer
Good for data analysis to model prediction and application but data load limitations
KNIME is very easy to handle and use. Anyone can use it, and it's easy to learn. You don't need a specific class. They're very good at model prediction. It has got everything. From data analysis to model prediction and application, it's very good. I only use the free community edition, not the enterprise one. I feel KNIME is really good. I haven't tried any other tool or platform yet, but KNIME is pretty good. The workflow is great. You drag and drop, and then you have the data explorer and charts that give results. The execution is also good – it's easy to identify where your model has gone wrong. It shows you the exact point of error within the workflow, so you don't have to execute the entire workflow to find it. For example, if your workflow has ten steps and the error is in the sixth step, it will show you the error at that step. You don't have to worry about the first five steps. The Data Explorer is very good, and the charts are great too. The accuracy charts for different models, like decision tree, K3, Naive Bayes, are all very good. KNIME is great at reporting, whether it's structured or unstructured data. These are all very good features.
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

"It provides very fast problem solving and I don't need to do much coding in it. I just drag and drop."
"The most useful features are the readily available extensions that speed up the work."
"It's a very powerful and simple tool to use."
"The solution allows for sharing model designs and model operations with other data analysts."
"It's a coding-less opportunity to use AI. This is the major value for me."
"KNIME is very easy to handle and use. Anyone can use it, and it's easy to learn."
"Easy to connect with every database: We use queries from SQL, Redshift, Oracle."
"We leverage KNIME flexibility in order to query data from our database and manipulate them for any ad-hoc business case, before presenting results to stakeholders."
"Easy to use components to create the job."
"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 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."
"It is robust, offers market intelligence, and utilizes modules effectively."
"The most valuable feature of Pentaho is the Tableau report."
"I use the BI Server, CDE Dashboards, Saiku, and Kettle, because these tools are very good and highly experienced."
"We were able to install it without any assistance from tech support."
 

Cons

"KNIME needs to provide more documentation and training materials, including webinars or online seminars."
"I'd like something that would make it easier to connect/parse websites, although I will fully admit that I'm not as proficient in KNIME as I would like to be, so it could be I'm just missing something."
"System resource usage. Knime will occupy total system RAM size and other applications will hang."
"The license is quite expensive for us."
"I've had some problems integrating KNIME with other solutions."
"From the point of view of the interface, they can do a little bit better."
"In the last update, KNIME started hiding a lot of the nodes. It doesn't mean hiding, but you need to know what you're looking for. Before that, you had just a tree that you could click, and you could get an overview of what kind of nodes do I have. Right now, it's like you need to know which node you need, and then you can start typing, but it's actually more difficult to find them."
"Not just for KNIME, but generally for software and analyzing data, I would welcome facilities for analyzing different sorts of scale data like Likert scales, Thurstone scales, magnitude ratio scales, and Guttman scales, which I don't use myself."
"Version control would be a good addition."
"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."
"The repository should be improved."
"Logging capability is needed."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' user interface is outdated."
"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."
"The tool is very good, and yet it has some problems as it relies heavily on Java."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is a free open-source solution."
"KNIME desktop is free, which is great for analytics teams. Server is well priced, depending on how much support is required."
"The client versions are mostly free, and we pay only for the KNIME server version. It's not a cheap solution."
"With KNIME, you can use the desktop version free of charge as much as you like. I've yet to hit its limits. If I did, I'd have to go to the server version, and for that you have to pay. Fortunately, I don't have to at the moment."
"There is no cost for using KNIME because it is an open-source solution, but you have to pay if you need a server."
"Scaling to the on-premises version requires a licensing fee per user that is a bit expensive in comparison to R, Python, and SAS."
"There is a Community Edition and paid versions available."
"They have different versions, but I am using the open-source one."
"Free and commercial versions are available."
"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 ."
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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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about KNIME?
Since KNIME is a no-code platform, it is easy to work with.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for KNIME?
I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with KNIME?
For graphics, the interface is a little confusing. So, this is a point that could be improved.
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?
For those starting to use this tool, there is a free version available which is beneficial. The company also finds the pricing to be good.
What needs improvement with Pentaho Business Analytics?
The tool is very good, and yet it has some problems as it relies heavily on Java. The platform works with Java, and it has brought some issues to the company.
 

Also Known As

KNIME Analytics Platform
Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Infocom Corporation, Dymatrix Consulting Group, Soluzione Informatiche, MMI Agency, Estanislao Training and Solutions, Vialis AG
Cargo 2000 Lufthansa, Marketo, ModCloth, Cardiac Science, Telefonica, ExactTarget, Active Broadband Networks, and Brussels Airport.
Find out what your peers are saying about Knime, Weka, IBM and others in Data Mining. Updated: February 2025.
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