Pentaho Business Analytics Reviews

I found Pentaho Data Integration the most valuable component since it is the most mature open-source ETL tool available. Compared to other proprietary products it has a less steep learning curve due to it's very intuitive user interface. Besides that it has a pluggable architecture which makes it quite easy to extend with custom functionality and features.

Another thing worth mentioning is the very active user community around the products which provide some great resources for community support.

As for the data integration part each development team were writing their own integration scripts, parsers and interfaces from scratch on each different project over and over again. With Pentaho Data Integration which offers all these common tasks out-of-the-box we reduced development time significantly. Also by using such a universal tool and introducing a uniform architecture it became a lot easier for our developers to switch and/or join between the different development projects.

Also on the business intelligence part we moved from developing custom solutions on each track to the usage of standard functionality of the BI server and thus cutting down both complexity and development time.

Since most of our projects start off as a proof-of-concept with the Community Edition version of the products we found that the differences between the Community- and the Enterprise Editions are too big on certain levels. It would be a big gain if the Community Edition version would be a full representation of the Enterprise Editions making it easier to move on to the Enterprise Edition and support.

I started using Pentaho Data Integration around seven years ago and moved on to the full stack about five years ago.

I have seen many different (custom build) deployment solutions for Pentaho throughout the years each having their own pros and cons.

We've had no issues with its stability.

Since Pentaho supports running as a single process to a clustered architecture and has a big focus on big data (distributed) environments, scalability hasn't been an issue for us.

The open source strategy of Pentaho has resulted in a very active community which provided us all the support we need. Compared to other big vendors my personal experience is that response times are a lot shorter.

Most of our previously used solutions were custom built. We have evaluated both open-source and proprietary competitive products but found that Pentaho was the easiest to adopt.

Depending upon the solutions nature, the initial setup for a basic data warehouse architecture is quite straightforward. But as with all solutions as the landscape grows and user requirements evolve, the complexity increases. I think that Pentaho suits well in today's demand for a continuous integration approach. With this in mind the initial setup is crucial in a way not to find yourself spending a lot of time and effort in refactoring the complete solution over-and-over again.

We implemented it in-house. Keep your development and implementation cycles short and small if possible. Users demand fast implementation of requirements so the continuous integration approach becomes more crucial as well as self-service functionality. From which the latter is not yet the strongest use-case for using Pentaho yet.

Decrease of development time compared to our traditional development cycles in pure Enterprise JAVA solutions should be estimated around 60%.

Unfortunately I can't provide any exact figures about this. But using the Community edition for the development and test cycles drops down the licensing costs for the complete OTAP street.

As mentioned before, there is a great community of users, developers and other enthusiasts which I recommend to consult for your particular use-case. Check the latest Gartner report (2016) about BI vendors and ultimately visit one of the Pentaho Community Meetups to get more insight.

It's free and easy to use. You can actually explain it to any non-ETL developer.

It covers most of our ETL requirements.

There are issues with Java code and sometimes we have to fix it or apply work around.

I've been using it for two years.

There are issues with clustering, and partitioning which we have reported.

It relies heavily on Java caching and sometimes it causes issues.

7/10

7/10

I have used ODI, Talend and Informatica. Pentaho is just current ETL choice for organization.

It's very easy.

We have implemented in-house with customization.

We're only using the Community Edition.

It's very easy to use and implement.

Transformations. The wide range of transformations that are available in product suite, enable me to do data cleaning, transformation and mapping. I have used Pentaho mostly for ETL purposes.

Pentaho was used for data massaging in a system integration project. It enabled seamless data movement from one system to another. The biggest advantage of using this tool was that it support a wide range of input and output formats

Debugging and logging needs to improve. Not all the time debugging gives the accurate picture of what is going wrong with the jobs or transformations.

I've been using it for one year.

We've had no issues deploying it.

It's been stable.

Data type mismatch issues causes a lot of error in the transformations, which I believe at times make it difficult to scale. For example in many transformations you have to mention the data type of the data and if the input file changes the data type, these transformation also needs to be updated. Hence one data type change in the input file have cascading effects

I've never had to use it, but they do have a strong online community.

There was no previous solution in place.

It was straightforward, as there was not much of configuration was involved.

I was the vendor team who implemented this solution for the client.

It's difficult to predict the ROI as it was just a component of the system.

The tool is easy to implement, but it needs technical acumen to do so. In other words although it look like a simple drag and drop kind of tool, it can be fairly complex.

Here are the valuable features:

• Open source solution
• Fully integrated
• Customizable
• Extensible with a large community behind it
• Has a powerful ETL process (Pentaho Data Integration)

It helps us build decision supported systems. The use of MicroStrategy improved the decision-making process through enterprise report automation and corporate information management.

I would like to see self-service analysis and front-end tools.

The "self-service" feature of all BI tools deals with let final user (normally not tech one) do his/her work navigating data in a freely and not organized way.

Is exactly the opposite as create and manage a DW where data, metadata, are known and processed before.

Normally, traditional BI tools are more complex and complete managing traditional DW and in recent years other BI tools (like Qlik and Tableau for example) appears to fulfill this features.

We have used this solution for five years.

There have been no stability issues. There were some minor bugs that were fixed by the manufacturer in their regular patches.

There have been no scalability issues. Pentaho is based on industry standards to build scalable solutions. It’s very simple to scale up, horizontally, and vertically.

Technical support is good.

The installation had medium complexity. There is good documentation, but you have to follow certain procedures before using it.

This solution has an open source philosophy. There is a community edition without license costs, although it takes some more time to develop.

There is also an enterprise option that allows you to perform certain tasks easily and includes support.

Have a global and corporate design in mind. However, start with a particular area, small and well-defined.

Speed, performance and for me the best one is integration with any data type, including Big Data.

We wanted a tool where by using it we could integrate multiple data sets, and could get responsive reports and Pentaho helped us do this in a good way.

The presentation of data and reports. Pentaho have made a lot of improvements in the newer versions, but it's still an area of improvement when compared to other products in market.

We have been using Pentaho for over four years, starting from v3.2 we are continuously upgrading to new versions. We're also using Pentaho BI server v4.8.

Pentaho BI server comes with inbuilt Tomcat container which is easy to deploy.

No. So far so good.

No. So far so good.

Being a community user, most of the time we depend on forums and the kind of response we got for tricky questions was just amazing.

We were using Talend but simplicity of Pentaho attracts us and we settled on Pentaho.

It was very much straightforward except at some points where we did our customizations which we had to take into account during new installations or upgrades.

We implemented in-house on our own servers.

We are using the Community Edition of Pentaho.

- Correct URL integration

- Excelent Look & Feel

- Good Dashboards integration with Bootstrap

- Senior management dashboard

- Pentaho Reporting and CDF integration

- R Script

6 months

Pentaho Data Integration.

Pentaho reports have enabled our client and their users to take calculated and informed tactical decisions. The drag and drop reporting of Pentaho is very user friendly and takes care of all reporting needs very efficiently.

1. A few steps in PDI like Database Join can be fine tuned.
2. Work could be done on roles and securities.

3 and a half years.

None so far.

Pretty stable. But database and repository cache sometimes need to be manually refreshed to make the changes effective.

Yes. A few steps like Database join and merge join steps could be finetuned.

A 3/5. The support is prompt and timely. But there have been some technical limitations sometimes.

3/5.

Used MSBI sparingly. Used Pentaho mostly for cost benefits.

Pretty straightforward. Also the support Pentaho documents are self explanatory for installation guidelines.

In-house team.

Awesome. Even for enterprise edition. Obviously much better for community version.

Currently using community edition. So zero maintenance cost.

Not thoroughly enough.

If budget is a constraint, then Pentaho is a very good option. If budget is not an issue , then paid BI tools can be easily considered. Pentaho is leader in open source technology but still may not match paid BI tools.