What are Pentaho users saying about the software?
Read what people like you have said about using Pentaho software through verified user reviews
User Review Highlights
4.24
43 Reviews
Ease-of-use
out of 5Customer Support
out of 5Value for money
out of 5Functionality
out of 5"Ease of install I suppose; that and its ease of uploading reports into our EHR."
"Really helps to solve complex business solutions with its cool features and like their contribution to open source."
"Very good tools for visualisation of data. Dashboards are very easy to develop."
"Other report designers will offer time saving features that are missing here."
"This is easy to use but hard to integrate ,use is limited in many cases and not for every application."
"The bugs are usually not so easy to solve, and the errors shown sometimes don't give you a clue of what is wrong."
Jump to:
Product Overview
Alternatives
Comparison
Browse all Pentaho Reviews
- Have you used Pentaho and would like to share your experience with others?
- Write a Review
Sort by
Reviews are by default sorted by Recommended to software buyers, driven by our proprietary algorithm reflecting the depth and quality of the review, recency of experience, and other factors. As a neutral reviews platform, the star rating of the review is not considered in the "Recommended" ranking, and there is currently no voting mechanism that would allow site visitors to influence the ranking.
Showing 1 - 25 of 43 reviews
Anonymous
Time used: Less than 12 months
Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
April 2018
It is definitely the solution to carry out all the projects successfully!
Everything is organized better using this software. It is quite efficient and easy to use...
Pros
This software is wonderful, with it you can obtain performance and scalability. As well as manage and schedule reports. It is very efficient which means that you save a lot in daily reports...
Cons
This software is potentially amazing. Has it all! Your free trial is as complete as the paid version. It's very complete.

Enrico
Verified reviewer
Company size: 10,000+ employees
Industry: Farming
Time used: Less than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered
January 2020
Nice surprise
The tool allows the creation of complex ETL projects in a quick way and save time to produce valuable solution for the company.
Pros
Data Integration allows the build of such a complex ETL projects in a quick way, it's very powerful. Being an open source software allows the user to always find hints over the web
Cons
Issue log reports not really clear the error/s occurring and the troubleshooting results sometimes difficult. Scheduling
Reasons for choosing Pentaho
Pentaho is an open source software.
Karthik
Company size: 10,000+ employees
Industry: Information Technology and Services
Time used: More than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered
March 2022
Worth for Money
I was using both PDI(data integration) and PRD(report designer) tool for my internal project. Totally enjoyed and satisfied with my experience.
Pros
Best Pricing tier in industry, excellent Data Integration across the database nodes and high consistency in service.
Cons
Limitation in feature, customer support is not quick and data loading strategy could have improved a bit. Apart from these, everything is great.
Dalton
Company size: 51-200 employees
Industry: Transportation/Trucking/Railroad
Time used: More than 2 years
April 2017
Riding a Wild Horse - Community Edition
Pros
Many features. I like to use the reporting PRD, I think that it is the best. I use Spoon/Kettle that is a ETL tool to process data.
Cons
Many bugs. Maybe is because of Community Edition. We have many difficult to install in cloud. The layout of some report that run in developing, don't run in production.
Anonymous
Company size: 10,000+ employees
Time used: More than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered
March 2022
Best Tool for Reporting and Data Integration
Pros
Pentaho is user friendly, having high data consistency and integration with different database is cool for developers.
Cons
Report designer is having dashboard limitations and dynamic processing of data into report from database is not fast when data is huge. Apart from that, pentaho is life saver for developers.
Felix
Company size: 2-10 employees
Industry: Management Consulting
Time used: Less than 2 years
Review Source
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
May 2018
Once you understand the basics of this program it is very, but very easy to use
Pros
"higher visual interface to processes, has a good number of functions (and very easy to understand) for data reporting, integration, data mining and ETL.. very simple but effective Big data transform You can build many dimensional model and load the results of the transformation into a database to develop any report whit low margin of error through a dimensional model and load the results of the transformation into a database to develop specialized reports , low margin of error-Automate the steps for execution"
Cons
Its a great tool to use, nothing to dislike about the product. Nothing to dislike, everything is good. All the features are really good.
Karthick
Company size: 10,000+ employees
Industry: Information Technology and Services
Time used: More than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered
April 2022
Excellent tool for integration and reporting
Pros
Excellent data integration across various data nodes, high user friendly which means easy to learn and cheaper cost compared to current market standards.
Cons
Limitation in integration with JDBC connector, reporting designer features needs to be enhanced a bit and slow in fetching huge data.
Anonymous
Company size: 201-500 employees
Time used: Less than 12 months
Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
October 2017
The best tool for data integration
Pros
Ease of use and abundant features to get things done. Helps a lot in filling the various gaps in data sources.
Cons
Not so user friendly, takes sometime for new user to get around the application and figure out the various tricks and tools available
Anonymous
Company size: 201-500 employees
Time used: Less than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered
March 2022
Totally Worth it!!
I had used both pentaho report designer(PRD) and pentaho data integration(PDI) for optimizing power BI connectivity. Totally satisfied with my experience.
Pros
Excellent Data Integration, affordable price model and high user friendly.
Cons
Slow in loading huge data, technical limitation in reporting and resolving of ticket could have been improved a bit.
Stewart
Verified reviewer
Company size: 10,000+ employees
Industry: Marketing and Advertising
Time used: Less than 2 years
Review Source: GetApp
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
March 2018
PDI Community Edition is amazing.....the rest is mud
Pros
- Free PDI tool....its free so no discussions with finance - PDI is actually very effective ETL application with a easy to understand flow - Community is actually helpful
Cons
- Free BI tool is just slightly easier than building a website from scratch but a lot harder than using any other BI tool. - You need to know how to hack java to use. - The paid version does not have competitive pricing for the incremental value.
Kavan
Company size: 1,001-5,000 employees
Industry: Computer Software
Time used: More than 2 years
June 2017
Pentaho, a great open source BI suit with strong community support
One of the best opensource BI tool, also well integrated with existing platforms. It will be interesting to see how will it get integrated with fast evolving Big data technologies. Pentaho 7.1 is step in right direction.
Pros
- We mature DI (Data integration) module - Easy to learn design console (Spoon) - wide community support - Very well integrated with different platforms - Innovating fast in Big data world specially Pentaho 7.1
Cons
- Not very well documented for latest releases one of the reasons is many innovation are happening very fast
senando
Company size: 51-200 employees
Industry: Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing
Time used: Less than 2 years
Review Source
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
January 2019
Great partner of IT business analyst
Using this kind of software brings ease and accurate data reports that helps the company on decision making
Pros
Easy to use, compatible in many database such as mysql, ms sql server, different type of output to choose such as excel, html, richtext, etc.
Cons
Some version are slow on initializing and fetching data such as Pentaho report designer version 5 and above. Unlike version 3 which has smooth process, that was base on my experience.
riyaadh
Company size: 51-200 employees
Industry: Telecommunications
Time used: More than 2 years
Review Source
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
October 2018
ETL on the fly
Pros
Drag and drop functionality makes it easy to create transformations. Able to analyse data from multiple sources quickly and efficiently. Jobs can be scheduled in order to run specific tasks and transformations at a certain time.
Cons
Can take some time to figure out how to use it as there are lots of components involved. Can be a bit slow or run into out of memory issues for bigger queries but upping the virtual memory in the configuration can fix this issue.
James
Company size: 11-50 employees
Industry: Legal Services
Time used: Less than 12 months
February 2017
Saves me not only hours, but DAYS
Pros
Pentaho has nice schema browsing features whereby one not need know anything about the underlying schema in order to design a transformation. Automatic multi-threading by default.
Cons
When outputting to a table, Talend has an option to Drop if exists, and create. Pentaho has a Truncate [prior to load], but no option create the table as part of the data flow nor an option to drop an existing table.
Michelle
Company size: 51-200 employees
Industry: Civic & Social Organization
Time used: More than 2 years
Review Source
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
April 2018
Pentaho Review
Pros
Once you understand the basics of this program it is easy to use. The bonus with this program is that if someone write a report, they can share the script with you. The updated 6.1 version is definitely an improvement.
Cons
If you are not at all familiar with writing script, this program can be very challenging. No real user manuals are included.
Ritchea
Company size: 501-1,000 employees
Industry: Computer Software
Time used: More than 2 years
Review Source
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
May 2018
Best Data integration and business analytics tool
Best product for reporting and analyzing.
Pros
Best reporting tool.Features like data reporting, integration, data mining and ETL. Provides easy and good insights of business. Provides intuitive interface for most advanced users
Cons
Sometimes Pentaho Spoon(GUI) crashes.sharing and collaboration capabilities need to be enhanced Other all features are really good.
Anonymous
Time used: More than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
March 2018
Practical, versatile and objective
Fast execution of ETL processes in the case of massive data migration with a very low margin of error
Pros
-Automate the steps for execution - It has a friendly graphic environment - Easy to use - Wide range of tools
Cons
-High basic requirements for execution. - lack of detailed comments in error messages. -It does not have documentation in Spanish language.
Anonymous
Company size: 501-1,000 employees
Time used: Less than 12 months
Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered
November 2018
One of the best Business Analytics tool out there
Pros
This tool can be installed on any operating system. It has a simple interface, so it takes less time to learn.
Cons
The design of the software is pretty old! Needs lot of improvement when compared to its competitors.
Hasin
Company size: 2-10 employees
Industry: Computer Software
Time used: More than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
December 2018
I love the out of the box visualization templates!
I really like using it but chose to use other apps like tableau due to lack of features.
Pros
Pentaho makes it really easy to generate some complex data driven visualizations.
Cons
Pentaho doesn't have a lot of options for pulling data from public APIs.
Anonymous
Company size: 51-200 employees
Time used: More than 2 years
Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
February 2018
Gives me the ability to use clicks instead of code.
Pros
Penatho brings a visual interface to processes which would traditionally only be accomplished by many, many lines of code (which it can also do). Many powerful inputs from servers, software, and CRM systems. It also has very detailed error handling, which makes it easy to troubleshoot.
Cons
Support is mostly wiki/community based, with instructions for particular steps being lacking, outdated, or missing completely. Outputs could be simplified as well, with even a basic CSV output being slightly more complex than it should be, compared to other steps.
Yinghua
Industry: Financial Services
Time used: Free Trial
December 2014
Pentaho is a user-friendly open source ETL tool
Pros
I like its ease of use; it is very easy to build an ETL pipeline after the initial learning curve. I also like the variety of modules. There are a lot of powerful modules, and you will mostly find the module you want. User-defined code is very flexible; it's possible and very easy to plug in user-defined Java code. When there is no module implemented for desired function, this feature comes handy. Multithreading is also easy. The transformation can be set to run multiple copies in parallel.
Cons
Occasionally, Pentaho Spoon (GUI) crashes, and a restart is required.
Victor
Company size: 2-10 employees
Industry: Computer Software
Time used: Less than 6 months
Review Source
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
November 2017
Pentaho is amazing...
It's a great platform, congratulations ... is the only one compatible with the bank I use, only a more robust documentation is missing.
Pros
The only BI software that is compatible with Firebird SQL, I have not found any other compatible BI.
Cons
Particularly I found it difficult to start learning, the documentation regarding the data integration (spoon) is scarce.
naresh
Company size: 5,001-10,000 employees
Industry: Health, Wellness and Fitness
Time used: Less than 12 months
Review Source: Capterra
December 2016
cool tool for your web app
I was impressed with the ability to integrate this into an existing web app. It allowed our users to start looking at operational data and learning from it.
Pros
It provided an intuitive interface for most advanced users.
Gaurav
Industry: Primary/Secondary Education
Time used: Less than 12 months
October 2015
Good business analytics tool
Pros
Fetures like data reporting, integration, data mining and ETL capabilities
Cons
nothing to dislike, everything is good. All the features are really good.
Luigi
Company size: 11-50 employees
Industry: Computer Software
Time used: Less than 2 years
Review Source
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.
May 2018
An easy BI tool with a POWERFULL ETL inside
Pros
Pentaho BI Solution is nomilly a BI Open Source solution that can compete with the most important players of this area. Pentaho is easy to manage and has a powerfull ETL inside that can be managed itself as a product.
Cons
The "Open Source Philosophy" is not away true.... I mean that if you want a full support from Pentaho it will be not-so-cheap
