Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs dbt comparison

dbt Labs and Hitachi Vantara are both solutions in the Data Integration category. dbt Labs is ranked #27 with an average rating of 7.5, while Hitachi Vantara is ranked #11 with an average rating of 7.6. dbt Labs holds a 1.7% mindshare in DI, compared to Hitachi Vantara’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of dbt Labs users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

dbt

Read 5 dbt reviews

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1,560 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Read 59 Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics reviews

3,113 Views
2,428 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

dbt

Pentaho Data Integration an...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and dbt compete in the data integration and transformation sector. While both have unique strengths, dbt may have an advantage in environments demanding sophisticated analysis due to its advanced analytics features.

Features: Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics supports comprehensive data preparation, blending, and reporting, making it versatile in data handling. It offers robust data transformation capabilities. dbt focuses on SQL-based data modeling, version control, and testing, highlighting its strength in modern data transformation and streamlined analytics.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pentaho supports a traditional deployment model with options for on-premises or cloud, complemented by a dedicated support system. In contrast, dbt prioritizes a cloud-native approach, facilitating easier scalability and setup, making its integration with cloud-native environments seamless.

Pricing and ROI: Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics generally involve higher upfront costs with tailored solutions, potentially delivering strong ROI for larger setups. dbt's transparent pricing and lower initial investment make it appealing for quick cloud integration and value realization, with its accessible pricing model catering to those seeking immediate cloud transformation benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs. dbt Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs. dbt

December 2025

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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

dbt

Ranking in Data Integration

27th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Quality (17th)

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Ranking in Data Integration

11th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of dbt is 1.7%, up from 0.7% 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
Product	Market Share (%)
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics	1.5%
dbt	1.7%
Other	96.8%

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Shubham-Agarwal

Manager Projects at Cognizant

Incremental data models have cut full refresh time and support trusted executive reporting

I am not very familiar with dbt's version control system. I cannot identify any improvements in dbt because I am still exploring more functionality. I have been working with dbt for only three years, so I am exploring more functionalities and cannot see any limitations or improvement areas at this time. In the past, I used the seed functionality, which is used to load raw files, individual files, or static files into the database. Going forward, if dbt can improve or implement more features on the seed side, that would be beneficial, especially when we have large files available that take time to load the data into Snowflake database.

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Michelle Lawson

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product is developer-friendly."

"dbt has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to create our data pipelines much faster, going from ingestion of data to creating a data product in weeks instead of months, and we can do it in-house with the skillset we already have."

"There is operational efficiency achieved, and data quality and governance have also been achieved with modular SQL and version controlling, which reduced duplication of data and data errors."

"Since we migrated from SSIS to dbt model architecture, it takes around four hours only to complete a full refresh, and the client is now happy because our downtime was drastically reduced when we perform a complete refresh of the data."

"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 fact that it enables us to leverage metadata to automate data pipeline templates and reuse them is definitely one of the features that we like the best. The metadata injection is helpful because it reduces the need to create and maintain additional ETLs. If we didn't have that feature, we would have lots of duplicated ETLs that we would have to create and maintain. The data pipeline templates have definitely been helpful when looking at productivity and costs."

"We can schedule job execution in the BA Server, which is the front-end product we're using right now. That scheduling interface is nice."

"It's my understanding that the product can scale."

"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."

"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."

"I find the drag and drop feature in Pentaho Data Integration very useful for integration."

"The amount of data that it loads and processes is good."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pros

Cons

"Since dbt has a license cost, if a company is small and does not have much budget, they can explore other tools because there are other tools that provide the same functionality at a lower cost."

"The solution must add more Python-based implementations."

"dbt can be improved as I find the co-pilot in dbt is not very good, and my team has tried using it but opted to move off it and use other co-pilots such as GitHub."

"Dbt is not as stable as preferred, as it has had a few outages in the current year itself, so improvement should be made in the outages section as it is not stable."

"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."

"If you develop it on MacBook, it'll be quite a hassle."

"Lumada could have more native connectors with other vendors, such as Google BigQuery, Microsoft OneDrive, Jira systems, and Facebook or Instagram. We would like to gather data from modern platforms using Lumada, which is a better approach. As a comparison, if you open Power BI to retrieve data, then you can get data from many vendors with cloud-native connectors, such as Azure, AWS, Google BigQuery, and Athena Redshift. Lumada should have more native connectors to help us and facilitate our job in gathering information from these new modern infrastructures and tools."

"The product needs more plugins."

"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."

"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."

"Communicating with the vendor is challenging, and this hinders its performance in free tool setups."

"I would like to see improvement when it comes to integrating structured data with text data or anything that is unstructured. Sometimes we get all kinds of different files that we need to integrate into the warehouse."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution’s pricing is affordable."

"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."

"I mostly used the open-source version. I didn't work with a license."

"There was a cost analysis done and Pentaho did favorably in terms of cost."

"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."

"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 primarily work on the Community Version, which is available to use free of charge."

"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."

"There is a good open source option (Community Edition)."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	18
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	29

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for dbt?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was simple enough.

See all answers

What needs improvement with dbt?

dbt can be improved as I find the co-pilot in dbt is not very good, and my team has tried using it but opted to move off it and use other co-pilots such as GitHub. Additionally, the debugging capab...

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What is your primary use case for dbt?

My main use case for dbt is for data transformation and data engineering.A specific example of how I use dbt for data transformation and engineering is that we use it to connect and ingest data fro...

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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...

See all answers

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, ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

SSIS vs dbt

Compared 20% of the time

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) vs dbt

Compared 9% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs dbt

Compared 7% of the time

Informatica PowerCenter vs dbt

Compared 7% of the time

Tobiko vs dbt

Compared 7% of the time

More dbt Competitors

Airbyte Cloud vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 11% of the time

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 8% of the time

Informatica PowerCenter vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 8% of the time

SnapLogic vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 7% of the time

Qlik Talend Cloud vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 6% of the time

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Data Integration

January 2026

Download dbt product report

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

January 2026

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics report

Download Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics product report

Also Known As

No data available

Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration

Overview

dbt is a transformational tool that empowers data teams to quickly build trusted data models, providing a shared language for analysts and engineering teams. Its flexibility and robust feature set make it a popular choice for modern data teams seeking efficiency.

Designed to integrate seamlessly with the data warehouse, dbt enables analytics engineers to transform raw data into reliable datasets for analysis. Its SQL-centric approach reduces the learning curve for users familiar with it, allowing powerful transformations and data modeling without needing a custom backend. While widely beneficial, dbt could improve in areas like version management and support for complex transformations out of the box.

What are the most valuable features of dbt?

SQL-Based Development: Facilitates transformations using SQL, streamlining the data modeling process.
Modularity: Encourages reusable components, making projects easier to manage and scale.
Version Control: Integrates with version control systems to track changes and collaborate effectively.
Testing Framework: Ensures data quality through automated tests, increasing trust in data outputs.

What benefits should you expect from using dbt?

Efficiency: Cuts down data processing times, allowing faster access to insights.
Collaboration: Promotes teamwork through shared data models and a common working language.
Scalability: Supports growing data demands by transforming complex data more flexibly and modularly.
Transparency: Provides clear documentation and lineage tracking, aiding in troubleshooting and understanding.

In the finance industry, dbt helps in cleansing and preparing transactional data for analysis, leading to more accurate financial reporting. In e-commerce, it empowers teams to rapidly integrate and analyze customer behavior data, optimizing marketing strategies and improving user experience.

dbt Labs

Pentaho Data Integration stands as a versatile platform designed to cater to the data integration and analytics needs of organizations, regardless of their size. This powerful solution is the go-to choice for businesses seeking to seamlessly integrate data from diverse sources, including databases, files, and applications. Pentaho Data Integration facilitates the essential tasks of cleaning and transforming data, ensuring it's primed for meaningful analysis. With a wide array of tools for data mining, machine learning, and statistical analysis, Pentaho Data Integration empowers organizations to glean valuable insights from their data. What sets Pentaho Data Integration apart is its maturity and a vibrant community of users and developers, making it a reliable and cost-effective option. Pentaho Data Integration offers a range of features, including a comprehensive ETL toolkit, data cleaning and transformation capabilities, robust data analysis tools, and seamless deployment options for data integration and analytics solutions, making it a go-to solution for organizations seeking to harness the power of their data.

Hitachi Vantara

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs. dbt

December 2025

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