No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

ETL Solutions Transformation Manager vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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

ETL Solutions Transformatio...
Ranking in Data Integration
55th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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 November 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of ETL Solutions Transformation Manager is 1.0%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.9%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics1.9%
ETL Solutions Transformation Manager1.0%
Other97.1%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Vijayraj Amin - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Growth Strategist at MAIORA
User-friendly and accessible for anyone with computer knowledge and logical thinking
There is room for improvement in the solution's visualization tool. Currently, it provides basic reports and the ability to create graphs and dashboards, but I'm looking forward to more robust analytics. The plan is to enhance this feature in 2024, around Q2 or Q3, which would save us from relying on external tools like Power BI for insights.
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

"It is a reliable solution."
"Back in the day, we could only get reports and analyze what happened after the fact, but today now we can generate real-time insights. Transformation Manager feeds your data science projects. We generate models and then give them to the clients, so they can come up with real-time predictions and recommendations in addition to reporting."
"It is among the best, even if not widely known."
"Transformation Manager is the backbone of every data pipeline these days because the solution has been on the market for 20 to 30 years, and we use it for various industries, including financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, etc."
"You can get ETL, reporting, analysis, and analytics in a single shop."
"It is a very good open source ETL tool that's capable of connecting to most databases."
"We also haven't had to create any custom Java code. Almost everywhere it's SQL, so it's done in the pipeline and the configuration. That means you can offload the work to people who, while they are not less experienced, are less technical when it comes to logic."
"Lumada Data Integration definitely helps with decision-making for our deans and upper executives, and the fact that we're able to reuse some of the ETLs with the metadata injection saves us time and costs while making it a pretty quick process for our developers to learn and pick up ETLs from each other."
"If we didn't have this solution, we wouldn't be able to manage our workload or generate the volume of reporting that we currently do."
"I would fully recommend Pentaho."
"Flexible deployment, in any environment, is very important to us. That is the key reason why we ended up with these tools. Because we have a very highly secure environment, we must be able to install it in multiple environments on multiple different servers. The fact that we could use the same tool in all our environments, on-prem and in the cloud, was very important to us."
"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."
 

Cons

"Transformation Manager reporting could be better. There are better options for reporting tools these days. We use Microsoft BI sometimes, but Tableau is becoming too expensive. Microsoft BI's visualization features are maturing."
"We get decent support. It's okay but not great."
"They should build a functional architecture based on queuing."
"There is room for improvement in the solution's visualization tool."
"One thing I wish was better about Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is its performance, as it sometimes gets intensive on the CPU standpoint, taking a lot of memory in some cases, especially when dealing with big data sets."
"I was not happy with the Pentaho Report Designer because of the way it was set up."
"​I could not connect to our Hadoop environment in an easy and flexible way, and it was important to scale our data warehouse​."
"The technical support does not reply in a timely manner. The support they have in place does not work very well."
"I would like to see more improvements with AS400 DB2. I journalled the tables/instance and the data migration is too slow if I compare it with other databases."
"They could improve the logging generator. Sometimes the error description is so generic that it is not possible to detect the problem."
"One thing that I don't like, just a little, is the backward compatibility."
"I would like to have more languages/scripts supported in user-defined classes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive solution."
"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."
"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."
"There was a cost analysis done and Pentaho did favorably in terms of cost."
"You need to go through the paid version to have Hitachi Lumada specialized support. However, if you are using the free version, then you will have only the community support. You will depend on the releases from Hitachi to solve some problem or questions that you have, such as bug fixes. You will need to wait for the newest versions or releases to solve these types of problems."
"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."
"When we first started with it, it was much cheaper. It has gone up drastically, especially since Hitachi bought out Pentaho."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Integration solutions are best for your needs.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
8%
Educational Organization
8%
 

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

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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

Transformation Manager
Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Honda, BNP Paribas, RBS, JPMorgan, Volkswagen, Thorn Lighting, OpenSpirit, Rolls-Royce, Ulster Bank
66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Find out what your peers are saying about ETL Solutions Transformation Manager vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.