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Ab Initio Co>Operating System vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Ab Initio Co>Operating System
Ranking in Data Integration
29th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (17th)
Pentaho Data Integration an...
Ranking in Data Integration
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
61
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Ab Initio Co>Operating System is 1.1%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.7%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics1.7%
Ab Initio Co>Operating System1.1%
Other97.2%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2777331 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Analyst at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Metadata-driven lineage has transformed our data governance and delivers flexible integration
While Ab Initio Co>Operating System has positive attributes, I find that certain features can sometimes be difficult to understand. When I have too many import feeds opened, they can conflict with each other. If I'm using two separate import feeds for running my codes and they contain the same code inside, they experience conflicts, which creates difficulties. I believe this should not occur because it requires me to clear the work queue to run my import feed. I don't believe there are any missing features in Ab Initio Co>Operating System so far, but I would appreciate a better search feature. The global search is excellent, but a more in-depth search feature that allows me to search within the feeds or assets would be beneficial.
Michelle Lawson - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Streamlines complex data workflows and has supported automated customer payment notifications
I haven't used Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics in a couple of years, so I don't know how it can be improved. I was pretty pleased with it and was self-taught on it, working a lot with their team at various times, but they were surprised that I was able to learn it all by myself. The documentation is not bad, and documentation is the main thing that any product can do to make themselves better because the easier it is to find examples of what you're trying to do improves the learning curve. I think it took me the longest to learn how to do the asynchronous processing and have things wait for other things to finish processing before continuing on in the workflow. I choose 8 out of 10 because the one reason that it's been rejected at T-Mobile is that everything has to go through a provisioning process and has to get approved, meaning the actual code base has to be investigated by T-Mobile before they'll allow us to use tools of that nature. For whatever reason, we just haven't been able to get that approval; I don't know if it's on Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics' side or if it's on our side. The more you can make it easier for companies to feel comfortable that your product is secure, robustly tested and bug-free, and free of any other kind of negative hacks, the more quickly it will get accepted.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Ab Initio Co>Operating System support is the best I have encountered."
"The graphical interface of Ab Initio Co>Operating System is very easy to understand and allows me to visualize the data flow effectively."
"Co>Operating System's most valuable feature is its ability to process bulk data effectively."
"Ab Initio Co>Operating System excels at providing data lineage regardless of the type of data I have."
"Ab Initio reaches the highest performance and is very flexible in processing huge amounts of data."
"The most valuable thing for me is that it enables a technical product manager to be able to write ETL jobs themselves, which saves developers time so that they can do more important things."
"The solution has a free to use community version."
"It has a really friendly user interface, which is its main feature. The process of automating or combining SQL code with some databases and doing the automation is great and really convenient."
"We have a huge amount of data that needs to be cleaned and made more valuable for our organization, and this Data Integration helps us to achieve that goal."
"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."
"We have seen at least 30% savings in terms of effort, which has helped us to price our service and products more aggressively in the market and win more clients."
"From my perspective I don't see the difference, we can do almost everything with Pentaho Kettle and if we need a little extra we are tech guys, we solve it."
 

Cons

"Ab Initio Co>Operating System is a very expensive product."
"An awesome improvement would be big data solutions, for example, implementing some kind of business intelligence or neural networks for artificial intelligence."
"Co>Operating System would be improved with more integrations for less well-known technologies."
"While Ab Initio Co>Operating System has positive attributes, I find that certain features can sometimes be difficult to understand."
"Upgrading the bi-platform is a little pain, but the rest is easy to use and to set up."
"For managing very large volumes of data, Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is not the best tool, but it is in a good position to handle millions of records."
"​I work with the Community Edition, therefore I do not have support. There was an issue that I could not resolve with community support.​"
"In terms of our decision to purchase Hitachi's product services or solutions, our satisfaction level is average or on balance."
"In the community version the scheduling tool is not good, and we had to build it ourselves."
"There some steps that should perform better like the json input, but because of the flexibility we at inflow, override it by using scripting steps."
"As far as I remember, not all connectors worked very well. They can add more connectors and more drivers to the process to integrate with more flows."
"It could be better integrated with programming languages, like Python and R. Right now, if I want to run a Python code on one of my ETLs, it is a bit difficult to do. It would be great if we have some modules where we could code directly in a Python language. We don't really have a way to run Python code natively."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Co>Operating System's pricing is on the expensive end since it tends to be used by big enterprises."
"The pricing has been pretty good. I'm used to using everything open-source or freeware-based. I understand that organizations need to make sure that the solutions are secure, and that's basically where I hit a roadblock in my current organization. They needed to ensure that we had a license and we had a secure way of accessing it so that no outside parties could get access to our data, but in terms of pricing, considering how much other teams are spending on cloud solutions or even their existing solutions, its price point is pretty good. At this time, there are no additional costs. We just have the licensing fees."
"I believe the pricing of the solution is more affordable than the competitors"
"You don't need the Enterprise Edition, you can go with the Community Edition. That way you can use it for free and, for free, it's a pretty good tool to use."
"The cost of these types of solutions are expensive. So, we really appreciate what we get for our money. Though, we don't think of the solution as a top-of-the-line solution or anything like that."
"I use it because it is free. I download from their page for free. I don't have to pay for a license. With other tools, I have to pay for the licenses. That is why I use Pentaho."
"The solution reduced our ETL development time by a lot because a whole project used to take about a month to get done previously. After having Lumada, it took just a week. For a big company in Brazil, it saves a team at least $10,000 a month."
"We are using the Community Edition. We have been trying to use and sell the Enterprise version, but that hasn't been possible due to the budget required for it."
"Sometimes we provide the licenses or the customer can procure their own licenses. Previously, we had an enterprise license. Currently, we are on a community license as this is adequate for our needs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Educational Organization
8%
Construction Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise32
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Ab Initio Co>Operating System?
While Ab Initio Co>Operating System has positive attributes, I find that certain features can sometimes be difficult to understand. When I have too many import feeds opened, they can conflict wi...
What is your primary use case for Ab Initio Co>Operating System?
The flexibility of data type and source integration for my IT ecosystem is excellent because Ab Initio Co>Operating System uses metadata, so it doesn't actually access the data; it takes the dat...
What advice do you have for others considering Ab Initio Co>Operating System?
I have not been involved in the security access of the platform's data security features, but I know that Ab Initio Co>Operating System is very careful because it doesn't access any customer dat...
Which ETL tool would you recommend to populate data from OLTP to OLAP?
Hi Rajneesh, yes here is the feature comparison between the community and enterprise edition : https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/pdf/brochure/leverage-open-source-benefits-with-assurance-of-hita...
What do you think can be improved with Hitachi Lumada Data Integrations?
In my opinion, the reporting side of this tool needs serious improvements. In my previous company, we worked with Hitachi Lumada Data Integration and while it does a good job for what it’s worth, ...
What do you use Hitachi Lumada Data Integrations for most frequently?
My company has used this product to transform data from databases, CSV files, and flat files. It really does a good job. We were most satisfied with the results in terms of how many people could us...
 

Also Known As

Co>Operating System
Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

A multinational transportation company
66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Find out what your peers are saying about Ab Initio Co>Operating System vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.