Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Reviews

The most valuable thing for me is that it enables a technical product manager to be able to write ETL jobs themselves, which saves developers time so that they can do more important things.

Now developers focus on improving it as a tool (since it's open source) and teach Project Managers about it. The Project Managers are the ones responsible for their own ETL jobs as they know what they want, so hence it's best for them to manage their own jobs.

Its performance can be improved so it will work better with Big Data. Also, sometimes it can be very buggy which keeps away some potential users.

I've used it for two years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

The performance for Big Data needs to be improved.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

There is a community that can support limited technical help. I'll give a 6 to the community since it's not very active.

It was already in place when I joined the company.

It's very easy to install.

We did it in-hous. It's worth it to have someone in your company who knows Pentaho really well.

ROI is pretty good since it is kind of a major thing in our company.

The only cost is the time it takes for the developer to get to know it.

If your ETL jobs are small and straightforward, then this solution is definitely worth it.

It is a very good open source ETL tool that's capable of connecting to most databases. It has a lot of functions that makes transforming the data very easy. Also, because it is an open source product, it is very easy to build your own solution with it.

It is also possible to build a new solution quit quick so the customer sees results quite fast.

In the community version the scheduling tool is not good, and we had to build it ourselves.

I have worked with different versions of Pentaho since 2009.

There are a couple of bugs in the newer versions. We were forced to wait until those bugs were fixed before we could upgrade.

There were no issues with its stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

Because we use the community edition, there is no support from the vendor. When I worked with the Enterprise edition last year the technical support was quick and to the point. I was more than happy with their knowledge.

In the past I also worked with SAP BI. The main reason we switched to Pentaho was the cost of SAP. Because of the flexibility of Pentaho, I prefer to work with it.

When I started using Pentaho in 2009 the initial setup was quit complex, mainly because of a lack of good documentation at that time. Since then, it has dramatically improved. Also the community on the web is quit active and there are some good blogs.

I was hired to do the implementation. I think it is necessary to have a good understanding of the product to implement is well so I would recommend, when not in-house, to hire the appropriate knowledge

When you don’t have the knowledge of the product I would recommend to follow some courses in to speed up the learning curve. A cheap way to start with Pentaho is using the Community Edition. You can do almost everything with it and the purchase of the Enterprise Edition is not necessary

The most valuable feature is that it can take inputs from all formats, e.g. CSV, text, Excel, JSON, Hadoop, etc. It has the potential to provide the output in the format we require, and we can also use many database connections. The transformations listed are also very useful and are very self-explanatory. 

Also, the data mining feature which comes with the Pentaho business analytics suite was very useful to our project, especially the Weka plugin. We could score the records in the data warehouse, which helped in predicting the values.

Lastly, the GUI is very easy to use, so we can perform transformations with data very quickly, and create reports indicating the KPI in the reporting tool. I think that a company wouldn't need to spend more money on getting an experienced person to use this tool. All you need is a balance of experienced users and new trainees to get going. You can also start using the business analytics tool once you have integrated data. Coaching and  applying this technology enterprise wide will enable your business to take data driven decisions.

It makes it possible for the seniors to train new employees and junior staff very quickly. All that is needed is strong knowledge of ETL and BI/Big Data concepts to use this software.

I would like to see the data visualization tool combined with BI so I can see how data is progressing through various stages. I do think that they are working on this already. I also found, in my case, that the statistical data input wasn't working (.sas7bdat input wasn't working).

There have been no issues with the deployment.

It could have been the case that I may not have been doing it the right way.

We have had no issues scaling it.

I would say it is one of the most affordable tools to use for business intelligence.

You should go for this tool to manage your data warehouse, but I would suggest that you look for other reporting tools, such as Tableau, which are more user friendly and provide great insights in the data.

It is a lightweight ETL tool that's easy to get started on. It connects seamlessly to most commonly used data sources.

The organization went with Pentaho ETL and Reporting solutions as cost effective products, as compared to competitors. The ETL part certainly met those objectives, along with serving the purpose.

Since there have already been newer versions, maybe some of these features are already fixed now. The most troublesome missing feature was the capability to produce crosstab reports with formatting capabilities in the BI Reporting product. The one annoyance that troubled us a lot was the fact that every step in a transformation that needed data, created its own data connection. With some data sources like Greenplum, this was a problem, because they have a limit on available number of connections.

I used it for three years, from 2012 to 2015, and only stopped as I left the organization.

One issue with encountered constantly with PDI deployments was that the environment parameters for jobs had to be updated manually through the designer module 'Spoon'. Although the product has a feature of keeping Environment Variables outside Spoon, that didn't work for us, as we had one Development server used for Dev, QA and UAT.

There were no issues with the stability.

We had no issues scaling it across the company as needed.

It's about average. Most of the help we got was through Google searches and Wiki pages. One time we had an issue with a feature - our version of PDI could not handle microseconds. The product owner came up with a solution, but instead of applying the patch, wanted to sell it to us for a fee.

I am only aware of the client side setup which was simple enough. It was pretty much a one step installation process.

It was done by an in-house team. A couple of issues we realized later were regarding memory configuration for the environment. This needs to be evaluated and fine tuned otherwise you can run into job failures with large amount of data. We ran into this issue with 'Commit' points and 'Sort' steps.

There was an evaluation performed, however I was not involved in it.

We basically receive information from our clients via Excel. We take this information and transform it in order to create some data marks.

With this information, on these processes we are running right now, we receive new data every day. The solution processes the Excels and creates a data mark for them.

While we read the data and transform it as well as put it in a database, in order to explore the information, we need an analytics solution for that - and that is typically Microsoft's solution, Power BI.

Running itself with the ETL was very fast. It makes it so that it is very easy to transform the information we have. We found that very useful. 

The UI is very easy to understand and learn.

The solution offers lots of documentation.

The initial setup is easy.

It's my understanding that the product can scale.

We've found the solution to be stable. 

The product is free to use if you choose the free version.

The solution needs better, higher-quality documentation, similar to AWS. Right now, we find that although documentation exists, it's not easy to find the answers we seek.

I have tried some cloud services with the ETL, so perhaps that would be good to add.

The product needs more plugins. Right now, it just has a standard database connection and there are other solutions there that can have straightforward connections for Oracle, MySQL, and stuff like that. However, more plugins would make it a much better product.

We recently finished two projects with Pentaho.

The product is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

According to the documentation, it's quite scalable. That said, I haven't tried to expand it. We just use a single server and that's all we need right now. We don't have plans to increase usage.

We have three people who use the solution currently.

We don't really use support. We tend to do everything on our own and solve any problems we have ourselves. We basically have just read the manuals and that's about it. 

The initial setup is not complex or difficult. It's straightforward. 

The deployment process takes about two weeks. 

We had two people who handled the deployment process. They were an AWS DevOps person and a Pentaho expert.

We do not pay any license costs. We use a free version of the product.

I'm a consultant and an end-user.

I downloaded the latest version of the solution. I can't speak to the version number. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Developed ETL processes to load a data warehouse. Has improved our data integration capabilities.

• Easy to use
• Development of the product
• A lot of predefined steps
• Good open source option

There is not a data quality or MDM solution in the Pentaho DI suite.

No issues.

I could not connect to our Hadoop environment in an easy and flexible way, and it was important to scale our data warehouse.

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 switched from our previous solution for cost reasons.

It was not complex.

There is a good open source option (Community Edition).

No.

There is a lack of support if you work with the Community Edition.

It's very simple compared to other products out there.

We use Pentaho for data integration, but also PI to implement data mining. That has improved the intelligence behind the data. So, we are able to provide our customer with the ability to understand their data. Our customer produces terabytes of data, so arranging the data, cleaning the data, on data integration, aided our customer to understand the data to improve their business.

One thing that I don't like, just a little, is the backward compatibility. I used Pentaho from version 4, and version 6 does not work with the whole ETL design. So backward compatibility is a problem.

I have worked with this product for seven years.

It's a stable product. In fact, contains some mocks, where you can write your own Java software, and do an ETL, specific for your needs.

The support is very fast, but there are also a lot of forums to address problems, so you can find the solution to your issue easily. There is also the possibility to buy support, and when we bought support they resolved our problem in 24 hours.

It was very, very simple. I copied the integration folder, started the tool to design the ETL, and it worked. Time was required to design the ETL, just to understand how each block works. So, when you understand how each block works, you need spend no more time to use the product.

Before using Pentaho, I analyzed other products to understand what is the best ETL product. I tested Talend and Oracle Data Integrator. Oracle Data Integrator is a little bit more difficult to understand, how it works.

So, I preferred Pentaho Data Integration because you just have to drag and drop the block, draw a line to connect the block, write the query, and connect to the DB. There's nothing else you need to do. For Oracle Data Integrator, and also for Talend, you spend more time installing the product. By contrast, with Pentaho, you just have to copy the folder, launch the product, and then you just need the Java machine and it works.

When you start to use this product, if you have just a little experience and know about ETL, you will have to spend little time to learn the it. The product is very, very simple to understand. You can build functionality by yourself.

Anyone thinking about an ETL product, if they want high productivity on data cleaning and data movement, Pentaho Data Integration, in my opinion, is the best tool.