Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Reviews

• Best in performance in both hosted and local environments
• Best open source warehouse solution using the Kimball method
• Best Big Data discovery components and BI
• Simple and easy to understand and work with
• Complete cost effective solutions
• Best support in forums
• Best visualizations in the market - Protovis & D3
• Best custom interactivity features
• Best product for embedded BI
• Best for mobile responsive technology integrated, i.e. bootstrap
• Best support in forums
• Best documentation - Open API's

• It's reduced our costs
• With self-service we can save time
• Open plug-ins contributors

• Searching repository for reports or dashboards
• Repository UI
• Loading of percentage reports and dashboards

It has a fancy look, the best visualization libraries and is open source. You can get ETL, reporting, analysis, and analytics in a single shop.  Small, mid sized and enterprises such as CA have been implementing Pentaho. 

• It has a nice GUI that anyone can learn to use in just a few days with minimal training.
• It has great support for big data technologies; Pentaho 5.3 comes with support for HBase, Pig, Oozie, and Hadoop distribution support.

• It's an open-source tool, so you don't need to worry about licensing costs.
• We've deployed it with very minimal hardware.
• We have migrated one of the key project from Microsoft BI to Pentaho Data integration, this saved lot of money as well there were much improvement in performance as well.

The rule executor step can be improved. It has one limitation: we cannot give it a dynamic file name in this step.

I've used it for 4.5 years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

We used MSBI and we switched to Pentaho Data Integration and it has saved us lot of money and time.

For Pentaho, the initial setup is very straightforward.

We did it in-house.

Because it's open source, there's no issue of pricing or licensing.

Use if for any data warehousing and migration projects. I love this tool and we can use it without spending a penny.

I would say this is the best ETL tool in the market, considering this is open source and ease to use, very nice GUI.

It is extremely flexible, it allows you to use variables/parameters for just about everything. 

It enables us to automate our reporting and ETL to a very high extent.

The product itself is great, the biggest downside in my opinion is that it is hard to find (hire) people with expertise. Our experience with Pentaho software is that few people have the required expertise. Hiring additional resources for projects can be tough.

Our solution is that we tend to train our own people, it’s definitely not hard to learn, basically anyone with SQL knowledge and experience in another tool can learn using Pentaho Data Integration very easily, but you might end up training them yourselves.

We had no issues with the deployment.

There was no issues with the stability.

We had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Train your own people!

I would say that user-defined class operator is currently very valuable to me. Other than that native connectivity to hadoop (MapR), analytical databases and enterprise systems are really important to me these days.

I am a researcher in the field of data integration, and I am using this tool as a sandbox. I would say, because it is open source and high availability of forums and support has made my work really easy. Also, the reporting and analysis functionality provided gives me more freedom to test my test cases and results.

I would like to have more languages/scripts supported in user-defined classes. Right now the options are very limited. I know, if I want to do core programming I can always import my classes/jars into it, but it would be really nice to have more functionality in terms of programming language and support in UD classes/operator. Besides that, different parallel algorithms/skeletons would be great. For example, it could suggest which parallel algorithm I should use on a particular operator or a set of operators. It would be really cool to have such a functionality.

 If you are looking to integrate unstructured or semi-structured datasets with some parallelization, choose this tool. Parallelization supported by Pentaho Data Integration is a functionality that is really nice to have . You can choose which activities you want to parallelize and that's it. You do not have to write parallel code or something, as it does this job for you, which is awesome for a not so good programmer such as myself.

• Fast
• Easy to learn and then teach to our team
• It integrates with everything on market

We never used a data integration or BI platform before, and struggled with lots of Excel spreadsheets and CSV files. So when we first used Pentaho to automate a data-integration flow, we were stunned with how fast and how easy it was. We are very productive today thanks to that piece of software integration our data and the platform serving the processed data to our users.

An easier upgrade process for community tools would be nice. They also need to update the ad-hoc reports tool, as the one available is outdated. To get round this, we are using Excel as the output for some reports.

For more then 4 year

Upgrading the bi-platform that is a little pain, but the rest is easy to use and to set-up.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

We use only the community edition, so we only consult the internet for help. There is a strong community of users all over the world. Here in Brazil, the e-mail list is very helpful.

We have performed a lot of setups since we started using Pentaho, and there have been no issues there.