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ETL Solutions Transformation Manager vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

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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
54th
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 September 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of ETL Solutions Transformation Manager is 1.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.7%, 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 Analytics1.7%
ETL Solutions Transformation Manager1.0%
Other97.3%
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."
"It is among the best, even if not widely known."
"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."
"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."
"It allows for very quick development due to the intuitive interface."
"My advice for anybody who is considering this product is if they're looking for any kind of custom transformation, or they're gleaning data from multiple sources and sending it to multiple destinations, I definitely recommend this tool."
"The solution is easy to set up, very intuitive, clear to understand and easy to maintain."
"Running itself with the ETL was very fast; it makes it so that it is very easy to transform the information we have, and we found that very useful."
"It makes it pretty simple to do some fairly complicated things. Both I and some of our other BI developers have made stabs at using, for example, SQL Server Integration Services, and we found them a little bit frustrating compared to Data Integration. So, its ease of use is right up there."
"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 has a free to use community version."
"We've seen a 50 percent reduction in our ETL development time using the free version of Pentaho, saving about 1,000 euros per week and at least 50,000 euros annually."
 

Cons

"We get decent support. It's okay but not great."
"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."
"They should build a functional architecture based on queuing."
"There is room for improvement in the solution's visualization tool."
"Pentaho Dashboard Designer - needs an improvement on the various features of the Dashboards, since there are CTools available and which help to fulfil the gaps, but it needs developers involvement."
"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."
"The initial version we were on was v3.2 and we had multiple issues, but currently don't find any issues as a blocker."
"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."
"Stability is a bit of an issue. The GUI quite often ‘freezes’ and there is no alternative to killing the session."
"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."
"When dealing with substantial data volumes from cloud systems, performance can become an issue; even using the Enterprise Edition, the time required for executing particular pipeline tasks is notably high compared to other ETL tools such as ADF, DataBricks, or SSIS."
"Upgrading the bi-platform is a little pain, but the rest is easy to use and to set up."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive solution."
"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."
"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."
"The price of the regular version is not reasonable and it should be lower."
"If a company is looking for an ETL solution and wants to integrate it with their tech stack but doesn't want to spend a bunch of money, Pentaho is a good solution"
"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."
"I mostly used the open-source version. I didn't work with a license."
"I primarily work on the Community Version, which is available to use free of charge."
"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
Outsourcing Company
12%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
9%
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: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.