Microsoft Power BI vs Pentaho Business Analytics comparison

Microsoft and Hitachi Vantara are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.9, while Hitachi Vantara is ranked #20 with an average rating of 8.3. Microsoft holds a 22.6% mindshare in BIT, compared to Hitachi Vantara’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Power BI

Read 318 Microsoft Power BI reviews

25,672 Views
20,611 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Pentaho Business Analytics

Read 43 Pentaho Business Analytics reviews

697 Views
524 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Pentaho Business Analytics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Pentaho Business Analytics and Microsoft Power BI are two major players in the business analytics solutions category, specializing in data integration, reporting, and visualization. Microsoft Power BI seems to have the upper hand in environments heavily reliant on Microsoft software due to its seamless integration with other Microsoft products and robust support offerings.

Features: Pentaho boasts strong data integration capabilities with Pentaho Data Integration, supporting multiple tools such as JasperReport, BIRT, and Saiku for extensive reporting options. It provides flexibility in dashboard capabilities. Microsoft Power BI offers user-friendly dashboard tools, real-time data access, diverse visualization capabilities, and excels at integrating Microsoft services for enhanced analytics within Microsoft-rich environments.

Room for Improvement: Pentaho needs to improve its user interfaces, as well as add flexibility in reporting and advanced visualizations. The Community Edition limits functionality and scalability compared to the Enterprise Edition. Microsoft Power BI could better support diverse data sources, enhance mobile optimization, improve visualization customization, and simplify its complex licensing structure. Handling large data and delivering better error messages are areas it can work on.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pentaho is easy to deploy on-premises but often relies on community support, particularly for non-enterprise users, necessitating technical expertise. Microsoft Power BI offers more flexible deployment across cloud environments with better-structured technical support, which users find advantageous for troubleshooting compared to Pentaho.

Pricing and ROI: Pentaho's Community Edition is cost-effective, though its Enterprise Edition, while more expensive, offers comprehensive features. Power BI provides competitive pricing, especially with its subscription model, with the Pro version available for a monthly fee, offering solid ROI through seamless integration and enhanced analytics capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Power BI vs. Pentaho Business Analytics Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. Pentaho Business Analytics

January 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 831,369 peers since 2012

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

Microsoft Power BI

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

1st

Ranking in Reporting

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

318

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Pentaho Business Analytics

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

20th

Ranking in Reporting

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Operations Analytics (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 22.6%, up from 22.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Business Analytics is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Shoury Priyanshu

Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd

Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal

Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.

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

"Provides a full platform (database, ETL, reporting, analysis, and so on)"

"Data integration enabled my organization to easily pool data from our varied system into one data warehouse."

"The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are its intuitiveness and ease to use."

"I like that I can use Power BI to upload data. That is very important for me. The visualization is also convenient and easy to use."

"It gives you an edge if you are on the Microsoft platform. If you have been using Microsoft products for a long time or if you have the Microsoft infrastructure, this is the right tool for you. It has seamless integration with Microsoft SQL Server and other sources, and you get the best of the three things (SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS) in one suite."

"With Power BI, you're able to store your data within spreadsheets and SharePoints, and then have Power BI pull the data out and report on it. So we actually saved a ton of money not needing to load the data into databases, which is a big prerequisite for many other reporting tools."

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."

"It is really flexible. The charts and reports are really nice. You have the flexibility of self-service."

More Microsoft Power BI 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."

"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."

"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."

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."

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

"Easy to use components to create the job."

Cons

"I would prefer that the solution not be shared. I'm concerned that if we make a mistake we could reveal information to people who shouldn't see it. I would like to have my own on-prem server, to buy my own server and have my own infrastructure for Microsoft BI, with only with my data."

"I believe the price should be degressive, and we should have a lower, or better unit price if we have more users."

"There are some other visuals that are available in the Microsoft marketplace, however, you need to use them via trial and error. There needs to be a write-up about how to use them with a quick guide describing the visual."

"It has limited performance capabilities in terms of connecting to large transactional databases, but it is fine for simple and quick queries from Excel spreadsheets or one table. The premium level is going to be more applicable for the higher transaction-level databases."

"The orchestration module for refreshing data flows is something that is missing and we have to do it manually."

"It is getting better but still, there are opportunity areas in some aspects, especially the Windows OS dependency."

"here are still better UI designs they can go through. I'm assuming they are focusing more on capabilities rather than look-and-feel designs."

"It seems that the solution could use more analytics to help users draw more contextual business insights. Right now, you need other solutions for that."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"The repository should be improved."

"The tool is very good, and yet it has some problems as it relies heavily on Java."

"Logging capability is needed."

"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."

"Version control would be a good addition."

"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."

More Pentaho Business Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft BI is considered to be competitively priced when compared to other similar solutions in the market."

"We pay for users who are publishing on the cloud. The desktop version is free. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."

"The solution's costs are quite reasonable given the range of features provided."

"The cost of licensing depends on the number of people that are going to be using the reports, and we are satisfied with it at $10 per user."

"Power BI is cost-effective compared to other reporting tools."

"Power BI premium is really expensive for our market. A lot of small and medium companies would like to purchase it, but they can't afford it."

"Downloading Power BI Desktop is free."

"I used a two months free trial to see if it had what I needed."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"Free and commercial versions are available."

"Pentaho is expensive ."

"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."

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

831,369 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

Feb 4, 2015

Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho

1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

43%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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...

See all answers

Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...

See all answers

How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Pentaho Business Analytics?

I work in business intelligence with Pentaho. I am associated with the marketing industry as well as the automotive industry. I help in marketing intelligence and work on insights for CEOs and head...

See all answers

Comparisons

Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 16% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

KNIME vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

KNIME vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 29% of the time

Databricks vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 19% of the time

SAP Crystal Reports vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 9% of the time

Tableau vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 9% of the time

Apache Spark vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 6% of the time

More Pentaho Business Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

January 2025

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Business Analytics

January 2025

Download Pentaho Business Analytics product report

Also Known As

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics

Overview

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Microsoft

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.

Hitachi Vantara

Sample Customers

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox

Cargo 2000 Lufthansa, Marketo, ModCloth, Cardiac Science, Telefonica, ExactTarget, Active Broadband Networks, and Brussels Airport.

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. Pentaho Business Analytics

January 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Power BI vs. Pentaho Business Analytics

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power BI vs. Pentaho Business Analytics and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

831,369 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Microsoft Power BI 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.