--- title: Pentaho Reviews meta_title: 'Pentaho Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 50 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Pentaho works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.1 review_count: 50 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-12' parent_category: name: Analytics Tools & Software url: https://www.g2.com/categories/analytics-tools-software --- # Pentaho Reviews **Vendor:** Pentaho **Category:** [Analytics Platforms](https://www.g2.com/categories/analytics-platforms) **Average Rating:** 4.1/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 50 ## About Pentaho Pentaho is a modular, enterprise-grade platform that makes it easy to manage complex data—on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid environments. Whether structured or unstructured, your data becomes a trusted asset that teams can use to operate with confidence, agility, and control. ## Pentaho Reviews ### 1. Very easy to setup to build Snowflake reports and dashboards **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 08, 2021 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** It was so easy to build reports and dashboards on our Snowflake warehouse with Pentaho Business Analytics. We basically setup the Snowflake JDBC driver, created a data source using the Data Source Wizard and was doing ad-hoc analysis and dashboarding within an hour. The visualizations also look very nice like the heat grid and map. Seems like there are a lot of tuning and configuration options available. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** There are a lot of tools/options to consider when trying to solve the basic problem of building a report. I suppose it may take some time to figure out which tool (i.e. Analyzer, Reporting, CDE, etc.) is the best one based on needs. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building marketing campaign dashboards on data in Snowflake. We need to compare campaign results for Control/AB vs. promotion variations. We've been able to get up and running very quickly. ### 2. Pentaho to work with external IT services **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andreas W. | Information Technology Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 20, 2019 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Pentaho Business Analytics is a very advanced, hardware-compatible ETL system which can handle large amounts of data rapidly, while using information from a variety of sources. It's so customer-friendly that, even though you're not aware of SQL, you are going to be able to learn it quickly. Basic jobs and changes can quickly be generated with Pentaho, asi t provides advanced information access and processing capabilities. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** It would be nice to have a replication template on objects, tables, bridge-tabs, maps, which would help the layout. I think many core elements, such as communication and working ability, must be improved. Also, the marketplace has a rapid JSON output stage, but I feel I'd be better if Pentaho could be able to render JSON processing even more rapidly. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Pentaho is quick, eye-catching and straightforward to use. In our particular instance, we use it to build a number of tasks and changes that our office assistant users need every day. It also has numerous bulk loaders and, in contrast to overall capability, it allows the implementation of Qlik Sense and Pentaho Sales. However, it is less flexible than broader devices like Qlik. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Pentaho Business Analytics currently is used this for our external IT services. A second framework must be built to operate small and simple software for modeling information warehouses and market intelligences. Also, Pentaho allows our project managers to cut data for different departments through the Pentaho User Console. ### 3. Get assistment on the production and management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Callum F. | IT Support Specialist, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 21, 2019 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** The automated Pentaho solutions are simple to learn and can insert and convert information that you have easily. Pentaho Analyzer is a versatile and straightforward analysis tool built on the Enterprise software of Pentaho. Also, it lets you link to almost every data source as long as you have a JDBC socket, REST API and any other endpoint of the Network. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** Pentaho does not have a large community of users, so the feedback is very limited. We have some user groups that are helping each other out, but that's it. Also, more guidelines need to be provided in order to set analytical diagrams or create models manually. In general, Pentaho needs some improvements, as it has all the potential to become a genuinely side-to-end BI solution. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Pentaho Business Analytics is well suited for companies that need assistment on the production and management of their warehouses. It can effectively be applied and follows most machine learning applications. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** This software is being used in the IT deparment of my organization. We use it to provide personalized information to several internal and external clients, to handle MDX requests on the consumer feedback platform behind our homepage and it also acts as a tool of evaluating employment and transitions, but the area of expertise of Pentaho is the treatment of tables. Pentaho quickly gained us access to the information and the integrated ETL tools were quick and simple to use. ### 4. Capture stuck information from a updated CRM program **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Conrad G. | Information Technology Specialist, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 18, 2019 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Pentaho is extremely fast when working with any form of RDBMS from data entry to data charging. You can also link to many information sources in a very easy way. The powerful graphical coding tool of Pentaho Data Integration is amazing too. Syncing with AD is very useful to set protection for a directory or group of customers whenever you want. Also, Pentaho does have an accessible-source version that delivers a large part of the Business Version features with no license fees. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** I would like to see Conceptual model Workbench's feature for the pier tables because they form part of the star scheme, and PDI reads JSON files slowly. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Pentaho is also a popular BI tool for the production of a vast number of complaints if your ERP does not provide you with a good alternative. Before implementing this solution you need to know the basics requirements for your company. While usig Pentaho, I recommend you to integrate it with Amazon RedShift because it is a server that is quantitative and almost any other database can be linked to free. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** In one of the business segments, we have established Pentaho as an incentive to capture stuck information from a newly updated, house-grown CRM program. In all the company we have several Pentaho users, who make good use Pentaho Analyzer to produce the reports. Also, the author of the pixel-perfect reports to internal and external public is using Pentaho Report Designer. ### 5. Data analysis to your greatest excellence. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Elaine C. | Operations Analyst, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 13, 2019 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Pentaho is multiplatform uses standard technology, it is easy to install and configure, it has basic environments and it is a flexible solution that allows to create functionalities or modules that adapt to the needs of any organization. It is relatively stable, robust and reliable. This is a free platform, so you can realize an incredible perspective to start using Pentaho and discover the full potential of this tool. Pentaho has many different features and an intuitive design that help create several reports and panels. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** So far it is a great tool to use, all its features are excellent. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Pentaho does an excellent job if you want to generate and maintain a data warehouse, it is an excellent tool for new companies, data integration is fantastic. A novice user can catch up quickly and the GUI is intuitive and very reliable. It has a platform that has a very intelligent architecture, which provides ease of use to the user when necessary. The platform has a very intelligent architecture and is believed to be extensible and offers the ease of use that the user needs. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Pentaho is used as a BI tool to improve the analysis and decision-making capacity, since it offers solutions that are mainly composed of an infrastructure of analysis and reporting tools. It is excellent for creating PDF reports, as well as interactive analysis reports where users can write their complement reports. Pentaho is used to allow our internal and external customers to compare the performance of our products and services and gain visibility into customer behavior and activity. ### 6. Cut data with Pentaho **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Carole L. | Information Technology Staff, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 11, 2019 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Pentaho is a very advanced, hardware-compatible ETL system which can handle large amounts of data rapidly, while using information from a variety of sources. It's so customer-friendly that, even though you're not aware of SQL, you are going to be able to learn it quickly. Basic jobs and changes can quickly be generated with Pentaho, asi t provides advanced information access and processing capabilities. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** It would be nice to have a replication template on objects, tables, bridge-tabs, maps, which would help the layout. I think many core elements, such as communication and working ability, must be improved. Also, the marketplace has a rapid JSON output stage, but I feel I'd be better if Pentaho could be able to render JSON processing even more rapidly. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Pentaho Business Analytics is quick, eye-catching and straightforward to use. In our particular instance, we use it to build a number of tasks and changes that our office assistant users need every day. It also has numerous bulk loaders and, in contrast to overall capability, it allows the implementation of Qlik Sense and Pentaho Sales. However, it is less flexible than broader devices like Qlik. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Pentaho currently is used this for our external IT services. A second framework must be built to operate small and simple software for modeling information warehouses and market intelligences. Also, Pentaho allows our project managers to cut data for different departments through the Pentaho User Console. ### 7. Incorporate and evaluate the corporate data with Pentaho **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tyla W. | IT Consultant, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 04, 2019 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** The delivery process was super fast. We just downloaded the program and within seconds we started creating analytics. Then, we discovered that Pentaho could be built into all kind of tech and framework, and have incorporated it readily and effectively with various RDBMSs when there is too much layout. Also, the model and CSS layout allow us to build something unique, although it may sometimes become a challenge, but it can still be done quite fast. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** One of Pentaho's main problems was its company licence because some of us, as customers that understood what is given in the large community edition, felt that its corporate features were far too big. Also, we have stopped switching to Tableau licenses for much of our inner dashboarding and investigating because we must go to the XML folder to add the new items to do this, which was a very long process. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Pentaho is suitable for advanced scientific uses or operational claims with major listings of POs, DOs and COs. However, if you need to work with pivot tables, I would suggest you to use another tool, although in Pentaho it can still be done but you will need to do some extra work. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Pentaho is the business analytics main source for the IT department. To incorporate and evaluate the corporate data on all structures, Pentaho is always capable to resolve more special needs. It has also been able to fulfill the many regulations for the business. ### 8. Conduct ETL with Pentaho Business **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Franky C. | IT Specialist, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 30, 2019 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Pentaho Business Analytics allows us to sort the data the user needs to enter and to create a further layer of safety to send reports or e-mails through security, classes or the list of users. Even non-technical consumers may easily produce reporting and graphs if presented with a well-specified web application schema by using Pentaho. It is also user-friendly and it helps several of our programmer users to learn PUC's user interface. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** There are team tables, but it becomes very difficult for programmers to modify this system when Schema Workbench is used to model a cube. Also, because of licensing issues, the modeling software of Pentaho has a very high price of technology. It also has relatively poor resources, maybe lower than designers and advisers may need. I wish Pentaho could seek to integrate quantitative material with all the functionalities of artificial intelligence. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Pentaho is an outstanding platform for evaluation and visibility into your results. If you constantly need to work in crucible tabs and measured columns, you can use Pentaho to read complicated linear regressions. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** In the IT department, we mostly use the Pentaho Analyzer and Schema Workbench on BI side to collect data from various sources and to conduct ETL in our data storage factories for organizational intelligence. There are many accounts and Dashboards and bursting reports that we have managed to produce. In short, Pentaho lets our domestic and foreign partners evaluate our goods and services' quality and gain exposure in the activities and industries of their consumers. ### 9. Pentaho Business Analytics **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 26, 2020 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Visualizations, Dashboards and flexible analytics **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** I haven't come across anything that turns me off. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Take a good look at Pentaho Business Analytics. It simplifies the process of analyzing, visualizing and reporting. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Taking security related organizational data and extracting value. ### 10. It is great. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 22, 2020 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** The routing , looping , calling child jobs in the package is great. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** The data loading from source to target is bit annoying . **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Will recommend to use . **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are solving BI related things . Doing ETL and loading transformed data and then building reports on top of it ### 11. Excellent tool for data processing and reporting. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kamta P. | Technical Lead, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2019 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Pentaho business analytics is one of the most powerful application to deal with data visualisation. It is being used by many big companies like synergy and many more. A user can easily integrate many datasource with this and build the reports for analytical purpose. The data integration tool Kettle is also very powerful. This product is also easy to configure as it is based on spring framework. The Pentaho community is also very supportive and documentation is clear on the implementation part. Pentaho exposes its core services using REST APIs so an enterprise can configure the system based on its requirements. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** They need to work on dashboard components. The indexing is bit slow as they are using Jackrabbit for file content. Most of plugins are paid so you have to buy them. A learning curve is bit high as this is huge platform. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** You can try this tool for data visualisation and dashboard components. The report designer allows you to drag and drop the components while making the reports. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using it for reporting in financial domain. We are also using this tool to migrate the data in different systems. ### 12. There is a huge community working on and testing the new versions **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Eduardo G. | Analista de sistemas de información geográfica, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 10, 2018 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Is a very versatile and effective tool, not only applicable in the context of business intelligence or big data, but also in the development of applications, systems migration or even data science (a combination of processes and systems to extract knowledge or a better understanding of data in its different forms) **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** Although it has a large community, there is not much reliable documentation, it has a basic user manual, which does not detail many of the concepts, which hinders the development and deployment of the solution. In addition, most of this documentation is created by users, who usually detail solutions to specific problems. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** The tools that are part of the suite have been developed separately. we see ourselves in the obligation to use different methodologies to be able to do the same actions but in different tools, harming the learning and development of possible solutions. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Thanks to it has a powerful data mining engine and OLAP server, the series of classification, regression, association rules, and clustering algorithms, supported us in the tasks of predictive analysis to discover hidden patterns or future trends. ### 13. Excellent for handling many data!!!! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Josbeb D C. | Administrador de Data Center, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 29, 2018 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** It allows the flexible migration of data from multiple sources, fully integrable account, n tools which is integrable, scalable and customizable. It has a platform that has a very intelligent architecture, which provides ease of use to the user when needed. This application is spectacular since it has a set of free programs to generate business intelligence and includes integrated reporting tools, data mining, ETL. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** When presenting an error collapses and erases everything, it means that when the memory fails it can cause damage to the final migration structure. It has to be improved, as you can see in its public activities, they are working on that, it is a BI platform oriented to the solution and it focuses on processes that include all the main components necessary to implement process-based solutions, since has designed from the beginning. Updating the web platform is not easy. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Recommended, but must be more explanatory in the handling of errors that are difficult to detect, has a knowledge base of the support portal, if applicable. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** In a company this software allows to determine and perform defective invoices, as well as in other companies it allows to integrate a large amount of data that turn out to be critical for suppliers with different formats, it can also be implemented for the detection of fraud. ### 14. A very good tool for Integration and Visualization **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Henning C. | Mitarbeiter, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 23, 2017 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** It was very easy to integrate the database and to receive realtime information and statistics through the tool. It is easy to use even for unexperienced colleagues. The tool is fast and you can easyly analyze your business. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** Not much. You have to pay for the enterprise edition. Without it especially the graphic solutions are limited. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** If you are looking for a convenient tool for business analytics then use Pentaho. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using it for the database integration and especially for analyzing our "numbers" in various marketing channels. Reports and graphic presentations are based on Pentaho. ### 15. Strong and easy to use data integration tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Publishing | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2018 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** It has rich data connection and user friendly GUI. The spool PDI 's drag and drop features can finish most of requirements, sometimes JAVA script can be more handy for programmers. Pentaho has many big data tools and it is very useful for people with SQL skill set. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** I am pretty satisfied with its features so far. The only thing I had trouble was to upgrade from old version and a new version, it was not very smooth and had to seek help from Pentaho support team. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** This is very mature and easy to use tool and it is easy to adopt and Pentaho has very good support people if you have premium support. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use it as ETL tool primarily and this does the job. ### 16. Easy to use **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 11, 2018 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** I like the user interface. We have just started using Kettle for ETL. We were using another tool before and we have now switched to Kettle. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** Still discovering all the features of it. As of now everything looks good. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** ETL. We want to extract , transform and load data on a daily basis. ### 17. Centralized data, but Unimpressive Dashboarding **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Logistics and Supply Chain | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2017 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** The ability to quickly put together a report with the data loaded into the back-end is useful for bare bones reporting. You can sort through and filter to find the data you need for reporting purposes. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** It seriously takes several hours to get used to the intricacies of creating even simple reports. Usually, the leads us to just do a data dump into Excel from the tool rather than to go through the pains of designing reporting dashboards. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Look at other market leading tools. Our company is in the midst of a migration to Qlik Sense and considered several other platforms (Microsoft BI, Tableau) before doing so. There's just so much more value in the marketplace than what you get with this package. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Centralization of data was huge. Benefits include aligning the organization around the one source of truth in the Pentaho system. Before, we had many disparate systems and with Pentaho, there's the ability to go and grab data and create your own report if you have the technical expertise. ### 18. Pentaho kettle - game changer or not **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 07, 2018 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** I like how it is seemless and make your work easy in ETL world **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** Bottlenecks while using big data and loading the data **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Definitely recommmend to work on big data **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps me in resolving ETL related problems, let's me load and transform data into easier format using kettle. ### 19. Awesome Free BI Platform **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dan M. | Professor of Business Intelligence - SAP Dashboard Design, Higher Education, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 21, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Pretty much designed platform. Awesome cost vs bennefit. Nice integration and reports, even better when we analize costs. This is a free platform, reason why, you can realize an awesome perspective of starts using Pentaho and discover all the potencial of this tool. You also, can search and browse a large and constantly growing gallery of custom data visualizations made by users, it´s a huge and awesome structure provide by Pentaho Communit users. You can get quickly up to speed by searching through an online Pentaho visualizations gallery to find the particular presentation template you want to use to show your data. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** It´s not an intuitive platform. You do need to study a lot in order to make some great progress. New users of Pentaho or folks who are interested in performing a specific task or type of analysis, needs to improve their skills in order to have or make easy their relationship with the tool. Once it´s a free platform, some of our managers dislike this situation, it sounds like, no quality or poor structure security for data and vizualiztions. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Nice to understand about integrations. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** My personal dashboards about our marketing operations, got an amazing views. Even better, all stakeholders got free and easy access to the business data, bring a solid and trust analysis to all departaments of the company. Underwood, our analysis got a improve once we stats to prepares many of the presentations, and posts links with tips, tricks, and sample data sets to explore. ### 20. Pentaho review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Igor P. | Developer Financial Planning and Analysis, Financial Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 25, 2017 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** This product has a free community version that can be used to satisfy BI needs of any organization. Pentaho has a lot of different features and intuitive layout that help build various reports and dashboards. Management was happy to see reports and dashboards in a short period of time. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** Pentaho does not have powerful ETL functionality which complicates installation and configuration process. The interface of the product also could be improved. Not a lot of user support to solve complicated issues with the product. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** The company was looking to improve its effectiveness through developed reports and established KPIs. ### 21. Big data integration with Pentaho **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Oil & Energy | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 16, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Pentaho offers open source business intelligence solution for data integration with PDI/Kettle ETL module and visulization . It simplifies big data hadoop integration with great flexibility and reduced risk of changes from big data system. It also offers seamless integration with NOSQL databases and connectivity to analytical databases. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** BI front end is not appealing like other industry leading front ends products. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Integrating BIG data with pentatho. Performance improvement for tera/peta byte data. ### 22. Provides better access to data and insights **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** I like that Pentaho is a drag and drop environment. Like everyone else, our organization has a ton of data, which is stored in a less than ideal manner. Historically, we'd have to create custom joins to get the data we need, but for those in the organization who were not comfortable with joins, they'd either get bad or no data. Pentaho makes this easy for users to get exactly what they want. I also like that Pentaho allows you to quickly adapt your data from table view to chart view, then back to table view without any issues. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** The dashboard reporting feature could use some visual enhancements. I've only played around with it a few times, but I've not yet figured out how to apply a global filter to all reports within a dashboard, so this feature could be made more intuitive, perhaps. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Converting systems is always a big undertaking, but this one seems well worth the effort. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** All of them. All of our data is being (or will soon be) surfaced using Pentaho, and all data users in the organization will soon have access to the tool. This will be our primary data access tool. I would suggest this product to any business that has multiple data sources. ### 23. Pentaho **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Grey P. | analista de siniestros, Insurance, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** app spectacular as it is a set of free programs to generate business intelligence and includes integrated reporting tools , data mining , ETL **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** everything is excellent as it is a BI platform solution-oriented and focused on processes that includes all major components required to implement process-based solutions as it has been designed from the beginning **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** 100 % recommended without hesitation **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** many benefits as it is an infrastructure of tools integrated with a workflow engine business process analysis and reporting. The platform is capable of running the business rules necessary , expressed in the form of processes , activities, and is able to present and deliver the right information at the right time ### 24. Big fan of Pentaho (PDI) tool - opens source community edition **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohan K. | Consultant, Management Consulting, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** I have used PDI (Pentaho Data Integration) tool (community edition) for archiving and error handling capabilities and find it the best in business. It is very easy to use and flexible. Learning curve is very less compared to other integration tools. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** This tool occupies lot of hard disk space in your machine. Support for analytics also can be improved. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** I would recommend Pentaho for simple integration requirements but not for very complex solutions. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Used Pentaho for archiving and error handling capabilities as part of high volume data loading to Salesforce environment. I find it very easy and flexible to use without any prior training. ### 25. Good Data Cleansing software **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Haince Denis P. | Data Engineer, Enterprise Infrastructure, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 13, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** The tool has ability to drag and drop different functionalities in the window and create a pipeline of tasks through which the data passes, and gets cleaned. Also the ability to create jobs and running them is a very good feature of the system **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** The interface needs some upgrade. It looks a little old and un-engaging. Also the application requires a lot of physical memory and hence slows down the operations. while creating transformations is easy, working on the job creation in pentaho is a cumbersome task and takes a while to complete. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Have good experience on Javascript as it required sometime in the transformations to perform certain cleaning activities on the data. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was building a relational data warehouse and used Pentaho for the cleaning purpose. ### 26. End-to-end **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marcello P. | Business Intelligence Analyst, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 15, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** The ETL Tool is always two steps ahead when it comes to BigData awareness. Besides, it's fully embeddable, scalable and customizable. The Platform has a very smart architecture and it's thought to be extensible and to give the ease-of-use that the user needs. It also presents a great amount of tools and frameworks to build whatever the new techologies bring in terms of Data Vualization/Consumption. It's opensource! **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** In the latest releases, Pentaho has been tackling their big weaknesses, which is to bring the end user closer to the data side of things. It still has to be improved, especially if you consider the concurrency, but as you can tell from their public activities, they're working on that as I write. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** When trying to get help, follow this order" - Support portal knowledge Base - if applicable; - help.pentaho.com - Community Forums - check also your country for local communities; - jira.pentaho.com - to file or read cases, not to ask for support. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** I've worked on multiple implementations since 2008 and I can give some examples of problems solved such as: - Determining when water meters start to produce faulty measurements/billing - State level water company; - Integrating big and critic data from multiple suppliers with different formats but one pipeline; - Integrating multiple data-mining tools using Pentaho, in order to implement fraud detection on an Insurance Company; The benefits I can outline are: - The enormous community that will back you up; - The reliability of the tool, behind a very responsive support team; - The fact that when it comes to sustainability, opensource DOES matter, even if you're a big deployer. ### 27. User through my company **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** The ability to create custom reports for my clients and give me more insight on my business metrics. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** Sometimes pulling the reports can be a bit cumbersome; we've had several server crashes that impede the ability to pull reports we depend on. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** I can give my clients an insight to past quarter metrics and I can view areas of improvement. ### 28. Easy to use GUI with lots of functions **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Minh N. | Data Manager cum Business Analyst, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 09, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** It is unique because of the ability to drag and drop different components and its integration. It also supports multiple languages and tools like Shell, Javascript, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL etc. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** Sometimes it is difficult to debug and the GUI is confusing in several occasions. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** It is very intuitive and powerful. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Extract, Clean and Transform data ### 29. Good tool for BI **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 31, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** This is a powerful tool that allows us to produce actionable data that we can easily share company wide. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** For many of our reports that are larger, it can time out or take a great deal of time **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Straightforward to pick up, worth giving a chance. Accomplishes my objectives **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Understanding trends throughout the business, and digging into which customer uses what ### 30. Great ETL Tool as well as Front End for Business User **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jim C. | Data Architect - Business Intelligence, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 13, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Pentaho's ETL tool is very stable when compared to something like SSIS. I find SSIS to be very brittle and intolerant of changes to source files, etc. Whereas, with Pentaho, when something changes, it is usually very easy to quickly edit the ETL and get right back to work. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** The built-in report building tool for pre-formatted reports is archaic. It is as if they just don't think people need something better. Here, SSRS is much superior to it; however, the analysis reports (on-the fly reporting) are great, so it depends on what you need. This tool is better suited toad-hoc reporting than to making a set of uniform looking pre-formatted reports. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** The licensing isn't inexpensive, but you can try most of the product for free using the Community Edition. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are creating health metrics to improve business process as well as report specific numbers to the Federal government. We use data from our Electronic Medical Record system as well as billing data from providers such as Medicaid and other insurance companies to monitor the trends and health of our patient population. ### 31. Simple way to build Interactive Dashboards **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Harshita S. | Global Strategy and Analytics Lead, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** It's a very simple and intuitive way to build highly interactive dashboards that help analyze trends and perform other analytics as desired for individuals purposes. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** Set up in not too easy and it's good to have a database to perform ETL as without it's it's harder to do a deep dive into analytics. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Give the software a try since it's the easiest and fasted way to build dashboards that are highly interactive in nature. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Quick way to perform analytics that are very visual and interactive in nature. It's easy to manipulate the data and doesn't require one to go into a database each time or an excel spreadsheet to do that. A huge benefit is that you don't need to train employees to use the software, it can be self taught with various resources available online, free of cost. ### 32. Simple, interactive dashboards **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Accounting | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 29, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** It's a very simple way to build an interactive dashboard for quick and detailed analysis especially for non IT users. I've used it to reporting purposes and it helps build reports in multiple formats like PFD and excel. It works very well with SQL. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** It's not easy to maneuver as it's interface isn't straightforward and simplistic. It's good to integrate it with a database and the setup is not easy and requires some knowledge to do so. Addressing these drawbacks will make it a very useful and powerful tool for BI solutions. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** It s a great tool that requires some time and effort in learning how to use it But once you do, you'll love it more than excel or PowerPoint while building reports and dashboards. it's definitely worth a try! **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's the best way to build simple reports and dashboards than those that can be built in excel or PowerPoint as the e ones built in Pentaho are highly interactive in nature and help drill down to any level of detail for analysis. ### 33. Awesome tool, not just for datawarehousing and analysis **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mauricio L. | Business Intelligence Supervisor, Furniture, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 10, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Awesome tool, not just for datawarehousing and analysis. We use it here for every kind of automation on daily routines. Need to run a report everyday with data from a e-mail, use pentaho to listen for that e-mail and do your report automatically. Of course we use it on our data-integration processes and on analysis end too, all using CE. Really and awesome tool. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** It's not easy to upgrade the web platform, but that's the only problem with it. And you can get it done with a day or two of tests, just could be easier in the CE. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Datawarehousing processes in ETL and presentation on dashboards to the end user. ### 34. Decent analytics on the free version **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 20, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** For the free version, the visualization and slice & dice options were great! **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** The implementation is lengthy and tough. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Tracking performance and growth ### 35. Best Reports Tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chaitanya Kumar C. | Software Engineer, E-Learning, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** It supports the Pentaho Marketplace which provides a place for developers to share their Pentaho plugins. A really complete BI solution. Excellent ETL module (PDI\Kettle), with some awesome visualizations. The maintaining company acquired Webdetails, one of the main plugin developers. Pentaho Reporting integrates with the rest of the Pentaho BI Suite. It has great visualization tools as well as good user experience. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** This is not fit for very complex reviews. It's very heavy software. We faced lot of difficulties when we try to integrate this with Liferay CMS portal. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** It's good product if you are looking for less complex reports and also it's a good choice if printed reports are an important requirement. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am trying to provide solutions for education industry. I generated attendance, grade reports of students. ### 36. Sometimes goes down. **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mark J. | Contributing Editor, Personal Finance and Travel, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 31, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** I do like the ability to chart sales/profits, when it works. There's often a time when it doesn't. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** I don't enjoy the downtimes involved with using Pentaho. It's frequent. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Try out other services first! **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm solving the time-suck that is pulling data that is relevant to our business. ### 37. Perfect for my enviroment **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Leandro G. | Founder and Business Intelligence Consultant, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 07, 2016 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Greate Tool for ETL, Easy Dashboard Creation, No License costs in Community Version. Great Community Support. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** Native tool to change the layout of main screens (Pentaho Business Analytics) Pentaho should provide more trainings and certifications based on Community Version. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Patience when starting to working with Pentaho. Learn JS **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Pentaho everyday in my Company, providing Business Intelligence Solutions for my Customers. ### 38. Experience with Pentaho **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 20, 2015 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Out of the whole Pentaho suite I love PDI the most. It is a great tool which gives you a lot of opportunities to connect to different data points and embed a lot of logic into your ETL. Besides having variety of predefined steps it allows to use customized codes which tremendously extend ETL functionality. For Pentaho BI server I think there is a great way for end users to get access to data either through predefined reports or analytics cubes (based on Mondrian schema). I really like the way it is not over-complicated and very much customizable. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** I think Dashboard functionality can be extended. For more beautiful and professional interface it is advised to use C-tools, but it requires additional development and administration. I'd like to see more dashboarding functionality out of the box solution. Right now it is in a very rudimentary stage. The other component which requires improvement is Report Designer. It allows you to do many things, but interface is kind of old and not much of documentation available. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** For the functionality vs price Pentaho is the great solution. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am a head of BI team and we provide our business users with data. We need to present information in a way so business user will be able to create their own reports and make a decision with less customized reports. We introduced cubes, but they still mostly using predefined reports. Dashboarding should solve it and this is direction we are trying to move to. ### 39. Pentaho Is the Perfect Solution **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kenneth P. | Database Engineer, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 04, 2014 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Pentaho works as advertised -- it provides a truly drag-and-drop customizable interface for your data. The Enterprise Suite has everything you need to start working and showing results right away. Pentaho's customer support has been responsive and timely when we've had issues. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** The Report Designer interface can seem clunky at times when trying to perform additional calculations on previously calculated fields or pass values to subreports. There is inconsistency within the tools in Data Integration -- it is clear the various tools were authored by different engineers at different times. It is not always obvious what goes where. There is inconsistency between all the products within the Pentaho Suite. Each has a different look and feel and none work the same way. Upgrading can be challenging but Pentaho customer support has been very helpful. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Do you need to integrate data from multiple sources? Pentaho is great for this. Previously, we were SSHing files around and importing with numerous cron scripts. Are your Finance and Marketing teams constantly asking for one-off queries? Pentaho puts this power in THEIR hands so they can pull and arrange the data they want into whatever view they want. Do you want to pay too much for a full-featured BI solution? Pentaho is very reasonably priced, and even has a free version! It has been too long since we did the research (over three years) before choosing Pentaho so I cannot remember exactly which competing products we looked at. In the end, the problem with all the others was that they were too expensive for our small company. Pentaho was reasonably priced and was exactly what we were looking for. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SAS all provide similar, but very expensive products. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Pentaho serves several roles in our environment. We use the Pentaho Report Designer for report design and delivery. This tool is fairly straightforward. It feels a lot like Crystal Reports and similar tools. Once reports are complete they are immediately accessible to our end users. We use Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) for Business Intelligence which includes totals, trends, and forecasts of sales and subscriptions of our services. The browser-based analysis tool allows our end-users to drag & drop measures and dimensions and instantly convert raw data into a variety of graphical representations. Before we had Pentaho, each view might have required a long query or static report that was hand-exported to Excel. With Pentaho's analysis tool, our sales, finance, and marketing teams have instant insight and infinitely flexible views of our data. Are your Finance and Marketing teams constantly asking for one-off queries? Pentaho puts this power in THEIR hands so they can pull and arrange the data they want into whatever view they want. In the IT department, we use Pentaho as a scheduling engine for data maintenance jobs as its interface allows us to manage multiple shards from a single source. Previously, we were SSHing files around and importing with numerous cron scripts. Pentaho is very reasonably priced, and even has a free version! Pentaho has had tremendous positive influence on how we run our business. It gave us insight into our marketing successes and failures by showing us actual trends before and after pricing sales. It provides a visual representation of subscription revenue so we can accurately plan for marketing and sales strategies. Pentaho freed up countless man-hours by adding simplicity to our daily data maintenance routines, providing a single interface for data sharded across numerous servers. Pentaho eliminated time-consuming one-off queries and reports, providing a browser-based user interface that sales, marketing, and finance teams can access from anywhere at any time. ### 40. Received proof of concept using our data; pending purchase. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 17, 2015 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** The best features are the instant return on investment that we will receive when moving to an ETL solution from multiple single source extract and transform programs. The scalability is HUGE. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** The pricing model may be different for AWS. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Ask them to demonstrate the product using your own data **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** We will be sending data from various source systems into our AWS data warehouse and SFDC. ### 41. Pentaho Rocks! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael M. | Vice President | WSO Product Execution, Information Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 11, 2014 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Using Pentaho Business Integration tools was far easier than I expected. Taking a terabyte of public information and extracting, transforming and loading it into our own data store for quick reporting took less time than we expected saving both our sanity and our labor costs. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** There is not much to dislike. I think the tools are not exactly intuitive to use but within an hour we had the "aha" moment where it all made sense and we could begin to see the fruits of our eforts. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Give Pentaho a try, you won't be sorry! **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** We were taking a bucketful of public data (that changes monthly) and creating a process to extract it, filter and transform it to our needs, and quickly load it into our own data stores. This process would have take us weeks in the past and tweaking the transformations would be tortuous. With Pentaho we could preview the results in seconds and make changes in minutes. ### 42. I use Pentaho for reports within OpenERP and I love it! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Adam O. | OpenERP Software Implementation Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 28, 2014 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** I like the easy to use report designer and the integration with OpenERP. It definitely requires technical savvy to set up but it is very easy to use once it is. I like that you can parameterize your reports to give clients that ability to filter through data as they would like to see it. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** The designer is a bit buggy on my Windows 7 machine. I may have the incorrect Java version or it could be a conflicting setting on my machine but that has been frustrating. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** If you are considering Crystal Reports or some other popular report writing software, have a look at the trial version of Pentaho. If you're a techy, then you can easily set it up, install the designer and integrate with OpenERP, JDBC and many other popular platforms. There are many ways to connect to your data and the parameterized reporting feature works pretty well and is very helpful. I also like the SQL query builder in the report writer and use it extensively. If you are not a coder or don't know SQL, you can also build your reports using the data object functionality to accomplish much. I love the trial version and here that the paid version for Analytics and Business Intelligence is amazing. I cannot wait to try that. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** I needed to run reports across multiple data models in OpenERP and wasn't able to do it with out Pentaho. ### 43. Pentaho for Data Migration **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Amey C. | Data Engineer, Consumer Electronics, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 28, 2014 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** I loved the Spoon product of Pentaho. It has lot's of possible data sources ready to use, including mongodb, redshift etc. Also you can create your own adapters using Java. This ETL tool is really fast and it's community edition is free. You can even write you own script to pull data from social media and combine with relational data. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** There is minimal logging provided out of the box. You need to find some work around to get the logging in place. I didn't like the reporting portion of it. Looks out of date and needs better visualizations. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** If you are looking for a low cost, customizable ETL tool, Pentaho is the right choice. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used Pentaho to move huge amount of production data from one DBMS to another in very short time frame. It was really fast and could work seamlessly with different DBMS at the same time. ### 44. Probably the best all in one tool on the market **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** John B. | Business Intelligence Analyst, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 20, 2014 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** The easy to use client tools, multiple out-of-the-box database connections, and simple integration is most notable about this product. Also, it is great for dynamic data-sources and ETL jobs. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** The administration portion could use some work, currently there is no functionality for the user to change their own password, only an administrator role can do that. Also, using a Mondrian schema directly into a Mongo source is not available, currently we would have to manipulate the data into a relational database in regards to Mondrian schema. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** It will be the best investment you ever made. We broke even on it's cost in year one and continue to optimize through our partnerships. We have also added value to our product by offering reporting to our clients. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have found hundreds of uses for this tool. From a client CRM, to real-time business metrics, to campaign optimizations, and even as a reporting solution for our clients and vendors (who barter services with us now). Executives get important top line data in real time, even on their phones; managers now manage instead of putting together excel reports to answer their questions; and the tech team works on several priority tasks instead of wasting time pulling raw data for analysts. ### 45. I used this product to control the loading of an Enterprise Data Warehouse **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jonathan S. | Practice Leader of Enterprise Architecture, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 14, 2014 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Speed of development and ease of use were the highlights. We were able to use a metadata repository to generate the packages. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** This is a hard question to answer because we were very satisfied with our experience. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Do not be afraid to try it. The ETL product works well. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a low cost alternative to a major ETL product we were using. We found that we could replace our previous tool and generate new work at a much faster pace with higher quality using Pentaho. ### 46. Decent ETL for 0 cost **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services **Reviewed Date:** May 12, 2014 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** It's open source, very good for small to medium (volume/complexity) processes, simple. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** It's java based, runs locally (where you have the designer interface), post-SQL transformations are not straightforward. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** There's a reason the big ETL tools have a reputation and a price tag associated with. If you need something small and easy to implement, I would highly recommend Pentaho, but I'm not sure how scalable it'll be. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** The main issues solved with this tool were importing/exporting from files (csv/xls) to DB. ### 47. Pentaho Review **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 23, 2014 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Wraps reporting duties in a user-friendly manner, and Report Designer allows for easy customization. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** The user interface could stand to be more refined; Auto-submit or text entry functions could stand to not refresh every time. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Streamlining the process so much of our reporting is automated. Pentaho has been a huge help for this, and we hope it continues to help us as it is ungraded and refined. ### 48. Good ETL product, mediocre reporting product. **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Apparel & Fashion | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 02, 2013 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Pentaho ETL product is good and seems to scale well. Has comparable functionality to Informatica. Wide range of connectors / transformations to pretty much do any transformation. Support is fairly responsive and knowledgeable. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** Reporting products are mediocre at best. Their various reporting products are quite buggy. Pentaho Consulting is expensive. Go with a 3rd party firm. I would not recommend using Pentaho Consulting at all. The metadata layer is not very intuitive / easy to use. Error messages are vague. Product documentation is poor. No perpetual licensing. Same cost every year. Therefore, there isn't a large upfront investment, but a recurring one. **Recommendations to others considering Pentaho:** Use this only if you have budget constraints or if you are in the infancy stages of your BI implementation. Their ETL product is very good and robust. ### 49. Pentaho PDI is awesome **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Electronics | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 03, 2013 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Love their Kettle product. We have used both the BA and PDI and stopped using BA. **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** The BA Server and admin dashboard. Filter logic leaves something to be desired. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Standard ETL , the product is easy to learn and simple to use. ### 50. Experience with etl module **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 19, 2013 **What do you like best about Pentaho?** Software allows you great flexibility to connect to a variety of data sources **What do you dislike about Pentaho?** Does not natively connect to Microsoft authentication (NTLM over SSL). This can cause problems when trying to connect to Sharepoint web services. **What problems is Pentaho solving and how is that benefiting you?** Process automation is the goal. Pentaho has served us well in that regard. ## Pentaho Discussions - [Are there apps for Pentaho that will allow me to access my information on my mobile device?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/2165-is-there-a-mobile-version) - 1 upvote - [Workshops and consulting?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/does-pentaho-offer-training-or-classes) - 1 upvote - [View Pentaho pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/pentaho/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-20+01%3A56%3A58+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=e3caf818-3e47-4d57-b673-89d36f7185bb&secure%5Btoken%5D=dbd5581de2a71f3f0b1b9a3d0e6e04f9eb2010b657f23b1f89e5e0b31cac945c&format=llm_user) ## Pentaho Features **Reports** - Reports Interface - Steps to Answer - Graphs and Charts - Score Cards - Dashboards **Data Preparation** - Connectors - Data Governance **Data Modeling and Blending** - Data Querying - Data Filtering - Data Blending **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation - AI Text Summarization **Agentic AI - Analytics Platforms** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Self Service ** - Calculated Fields - Data Column Filtering - Data Discovery **Deployment & Integration - Analytics Platforms** - No-code Dashboard Builder - Report Scheduling and Automation - Embedded Analytics and White-labeling - Data Source Connectivity **Advanced Analytics** - Predictive Analytics - Data Visualization - Big Data Services **Performance & Scalability - Analytics Platforms** - Large data handling and Query Speed - Concurrent User Support **Advanced Analytics & Modeling - Analytics Platforms** - Data Modeling and Governance - Notebook and Script Integration - Built-in Predictive and Statistical Models **Agentic AI Capabilities - Analytics Platforms** - Auto-generated Insights and Narratives - Natural Language Queries - Proactive KPI Monitoring and Alerts - AI Agents for Analytical Follow-ups **Personalized Intelligence - Analytics Platforms** - Behavioral Learning for Contextual Query Refinement - Role-based Insight Personalization - Conversational and Prompt-based Analytics **Building Reports** - WYSIWYG Report Design - Integration APIs **Platform** - Mobile User Support - Customization - User, Role, and Access Management - Internationalization - Sandbox / Test Environments - Performance and Reliability - Breadth of Partner Applications ## Top Pentaho Alternatives - [Looker](https://www.g2.com/products/looker/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (1,587 reviews) - [Sisense](https://www.g2.com/products/sisense/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (986 reviews) - [GoodData.AI](https://www.g2.com/products/gooddata-ai/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (597 reviews)