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

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

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
27th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Workload Automation (18th)
Pentaho Data Integration an...
Ranking in Data Integration
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Ab Initio Co>Operating System is 1.2%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.5%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics1.5%
Ab Initio Co>Operating System1.2%
Other97.3%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

AM
Senior Solutions Architect at IDS Comercial
Enables creation of sophisticated applications with powerful parallelism and quick, effective support
The most valuable features of Ab Initio Co>Operating System are its performance and the ability to implement parallelism. There are three kinds of parallelism in Ab Initio Co>Operating System, which allow us to create very sophisticated solutions for almost any kind of application. This parallelism is one of the strongest features. Additionally, its scalability offers a unique way to escalate applications that differs from other technologies. In terms of data processing, the emphasis is on understanding the data. Data profiling is fundamental, and Ab Initio Co>Operating System integrates tools to perform this within the GDE, as well as specialized products for this purpose. Data profiling graphs can be implemented when necessary to understand the data sources.
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 reaches the highest performance and is very flexible in processing huge amounts of data."
"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 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."
"Lumada has allowed us to interact with our employees more effectively and compensate them properly. One of the cool things is that we use it to generate commissions for our salespeople and bonuses for our warehouse people. It allows us to get information out to them in a timely fashion. We can also see where they're at and how they're doing."
"Since we started using Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics, many of our manual tasks have become automatic, and we have increased our time for productive things."
"It has improved our data integration capabilities​."
"The graphical nature of the development interface is most useful because we've got people with quite mixed skills in the team. We've got some very junior, apprentice-level people, and we've got support analysts who don't have an IT background. It allows us to have quite complicated data flows and embed logic in them. Rather than having to troll through lines and lines of code and try and work out what it's doing, you get a visual representation, which makes it quite easy for people with mixed skills to support and maintain the product. That's one side of it."
"We're using the PDI and the repository function, and they give us the ability to easily generate reporting and output, and to access data. We also like the ability to schedule."
"I can use Python, which is open-source, and I can run other scripts, including Linux scripts. It's user-friendly for running any object-based language. That's a very important feature because we live in a world of open-source."
"The solution offers features for data integration and migration. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics allows the integration of multiple data sources into one. The product is user-friendly and intuitive to use for almost any business."
"It's my understanding that the product can scale."
 

Cons

"Ab Initio Co>Operating System is a very expensive product."
"Co>Operating System would be improved with more integrations for less well-known technologies."
"An awesome improvement would be big data solutions, for example, implementing some kind of business intelligence or neural networks for artificial intelligence."
"While Ab Initio Co>Operating System has positive attributes, I find that certain features can sometimes be difficult to understand."
"Regarding the features, I find many issues using Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics when working with different environments, especially development environments and production environments, where I have faced many issues working with two environments."
"I was not happy with the Pentaho Report Designer because of the way it was set up. There was a zone and, under it, another zone, and under that another one, and under that another one. There were a lot of levels and places inside the report, and it was a little bit complicated. You have to search all these different places using a mouse, clicking everywhere... each report is coded in a binary file... You cannot search with a text search tool..."
"If you're working with a larger data set, I'm not so sure it would be the best solution. The larger things got the slower it was."
"A big problem after deploying something that we do in Lumada is with Git. You get a binary file to do a code review. So, if you need to do a review, you have to take pictures of the screen to show each step. That is the biggest bug if you are using Git."
"I have been facing some difficulties when working with large datasets. It seems that when there is a large amount of data, I experience memory errors."
"The web interface is rusty, and the biggest problem with Pentaho is debugging and troubleshooting. It isn't easy to build the pipeline incrementally. At least in our case, it's hard to find a way to execute step by step in the debugging mode."
"Larger data jobs take more time to execute."
"I'm still in the very recent stage concerning Pentaho Data Integration, but it can't really handle what I describe as "extreme data processing" i.e. when there is a huge amount of data to process. That is one area where Pentaho is still lacking."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Co>Operating System's pricing is on the expensive end since it tends to be used by big enterprises."
"For most development tasks, the Enterprise edition should be sufficient. It depends on the type of support that you require for your production environment."
"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 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 think Lumada's price is fair compared to some of the others, like BusinessObjects, which is was the other thing that I used at my previous job. BusinessObject's price was more reasonable before SAP acquired it. They jacked the price up significantly. Oracle's OBIEE tool was also prohibitively expensive."
"We did a two or three-year deal the last time we did it. As compared to other solutions, at least so far in our experience, it has been very affordable. The licensing is by component. So, you need to make sure you only license the components that you really intend to use. I am not sure if we have relicensed after the Hitachi acquisition, but previously, multi-year renewals resulted in a good discount. I'm not sure if this is still the case. We've had the full suite for a lot of years, and there is just the initial cost. I am not aware of any additional costs."
"There was a cost analysis done and Pentaho did favorably in terms of cost."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
Insurance Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Educational Organization
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise30
 

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: January 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.