Pentaho Review

PROS: The user experience is great and the app offers good visualization tools. Pentaho Reporting integrates easily with the other tools in the Pentaho BI suite. The app supports the Pentaho Marketplace which enables developers to share their Pentaho plugins. Top rate ETL module with excellent visualizations. In short, I would rate it as a complete BI platform.

CONS: The software is heavy and is not ideal for complex reviews. Plus, we found it hard to integrate Pentaho with Liferay CMS.

PROS: I appreciate that Pentaho’s ETL tool is more stable compared to SSIS which is brittle and does not stand changes to source files and others. Pentaho is much better because when something changes, I can easily edit the ETL and re-start my work immediately.

CONS: I find the built-in report building feature for pre-formatted reports to be old-fashioned. In this case, SSRS offers a superior tool. But Pentaho’s analysis reports are top notch. This tool is more suitable for ad-hoc reporting than to create uniform pre-formatted reports.

PROS: I love that Pentaho offers an easy and intuitive way to create interactive dashboards to help evaluate trends and do other useful analytics for our business intelligence requirements.

CONS: Setup was difficult, but it’s good that our company has a database to do ETL because without it, it is harder to explore analytics deeply.

PROS: Among all the Pentaho software tools I like PDI the best. This tool gives me plenty of chances to link to various data points and embed plenty of logic into my ETL. It allows a range of predefined steps and I can use customized codes which greatly enhance ETL functionality. Pentaho BI server offers an excellent way for users to access data either through analytics cubes or predefined reports. I appreciate that the app is easily customizable and uncomplicated to use.

CONS: A couple of features could be enhanced. One is dashboard functionality. You can use C-tools for a more attractive interface but it needs added administration and development. The out of the box solution can offer more dashboarding features as right now if offers only simple functionality. Second, the Report Designer could be improved as the interface is quite old and not much documentation is offered.

PROS: I mainly use the Pentaho data integration tool kettle. You can use it both in Windows and Linux. The app is intuitive and you don’t need coding skills to extract great things out of it. Pentaho is not only for BI, you can also do other things like extracting data for an Excel sheet and converting it to information for an SQL insert. I highly recommend this software.

CONS: My only gripe is that there is very little documentation available on the web about this software.

PROS: In my opinion, the Pentaho Data Integration tool (community edition) is the best in the market and I used it for error handling and archiving tasks. The app is flexible and easy to use. Plus, the learning curve is much shorter compared to other integration solutions.

CONS: A couple of disadvantages: The first is the app took up a lot of hard disk space in my computer. Second, support for analytics is below par and could be enhanced.

PROS: I would call Pentaho a top rate app that offers free tools to generate business intelligence and includes ETL, data mining, and integrated reporting features.

CONS: I have no complaints as Pentaho is an excellent BI software that offers all main components needed to implement process-based systems.

PROS: I think Pentaho is an amazing app, not just for analysis and data warehousing. We have used it to automate all our daily routines. You can easily run reports daily with data from emails. We also use it for analysis and data integration processes. It really is an awesome platform.

CONS: The only issue is it is a bit difficult to upgrade the web platform. You can get the job done with a couple of days of testing, but the whole thing could be simpler in the CE.

PROS: I love that Pentaho enables even lay users to easily build interactive dashboards for detailed data analysis. I use the reporting tool and I can create reports in different formats like Excel and PDF. Plus, the app works well with SQL.

CONS: The vendor can improve a couple of features to make the tool more robust and useful. First is the interface is not simple and straightforward. Second, it is difficult to integrate the app with a database and you need good knowledge to pull it off.

PROS: I love Pentaho’s drag and drop functionality. Our company has tons of data that is not stored in an ideal manner. To get data, our employees need to create custom joins and if they do not like to work with joins, they don’t get useful data. Pentaho enables our employees to get the data they want. Another good feature is you can quickly change your data from table view to chart view and back to table view without any problems.

CONS: I wish visual enhancements are added to the dashboard reporting feature. I’ve used this feature only a few times, so I still don’t know how to apply a global filter to all reports in a dashboard. It would help if this tool is made more intuitive.

PROS: I like that Pentaho software offers the ability to drag and drop various features in the window. It creates a pipeline of tasks which cleans the data. Another top feature is I can create jobs and run them easily.

CONS: There are a few areas that need improvement. The interface looks old and needs an upgrade. The app requires a lot of memory which slows down the system. Finally, it is difficult to create jobs as the task takes a long time to finish.