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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
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Ab Initio Co>Operating System is 1.2%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.6%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics1.6%
Ab Initio Co>Operating System1.2%
Other97.2%
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

"Co>Operating System's most valuable feature is its ability to process bulk data effectively."
"Ab Initio reaches the highest performance and is very flexible in processing huge amounts of data."
"The graphical interface of Ab Initio Co>Operating System is very easy to understand and allows me to visualize the data flow effectively."
"Ab Initio Co>Operating System support is the best I have encountered."
"Ab Initio Co>Operating System excels at providing data lineage regardless of the type of data I have."
"It's my understanding that the product can scale."
"I can create faster instructions than writing with SQL or code. Also, I am able to do some background control of the data process with this tool. Therefore, I use it as an ELT tool. I have a station area where I can work with all the information that I have in my production databases, then I can work with the data that I created."
"The solution has a free to use community version."
"It has improved our data integration capabilities​."
"Easy to use, support for all databases (jdbc and odbc connection), xls, csv, files, txt, SAS, R."
"Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics has had a notably positive impact on my organization, enabling us to complete several projects efficiently."
"It is a very good open source ETL tool that's capable of connecting to most databases."
"The abstraction is quite good."
 

Cons

"While Ab Initio Co>Operating System has positive attributes, I find that certain features can sometimes be difficult to understand."
"Co>Operating System would be improved with more integrations for less well-known technologies."
"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."
"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 initial version we were on was v3.2 and we had multiple issues, but currently don't find any issues as a blocker."
"I also found, in my case, that the statistical data input wasn't working (.sas7bdat input wasn't working)."
"The one annoyance that troubled us a lot was the fact that every step in a transformation that needed data, created its own data connection."
"Parallel execution could be better in Pentaho. It's very simple but I don't think it works well."
"I would like to see more improvements with AS400 DB2."
"Some of the scheduling features about Lumada drive me buggy. The one issue that always drives me up the wall is when Daylight Savings Time changes. It doesn't take that into account elegantly. Every time it changes, I have to do something. It's not a big deal, but it's annoying."
"I would like to see support for some additional cloud sources. It doesn't support Azure, for example. I was trying to do a PoC with Azure the other day but it seems they don't support it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Co>Operating System's pricing is on the expensive end since it tends to be used by big enterprises."
"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."
"There is a good open source option (Community Edition)​."
"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."
"The price of the regular version is not reasonable and it should be lower."
"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."
"It does seem a bit expensive compared to the serverless product offering. Tools, such as Server Integration Services, are "almost" free with a database engine. It is comparable to products like Alteryx, which is also very expensive."
"I mostly used the open-source version. I didn't work with a license."
"For most development tasks, the Enterprise edition should be sufficient. It depends on the type of support that you require for your production environment."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
28%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Educational Organization
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise31
 

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: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.