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Fivetran 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

Fivetran
Ranking in Data Integration
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Data Replication (3rd), Cloud Data Integration (8th)
Pentaho Data Integration an...
Ranking in Data Integration
22nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Fivetran is 2.2%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Erik Jones - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution reduces time-to-value; high ROI
Fivetran has room for improvement in data pipeline observability. The Fivetran logs are fairly basic, compared to, for example, the insight Fivetran gives into helping users understanding the performance of data pipelines. So I think their observability into the pipeline itself could be improved. In addition, Fivetran is in the very early stages of allowing other companies to access its metadata API, but that's something that could use improvement, and I know that they're working on right now. We use a separate tool for "reverse ETL", which is the opposite of what Fivetran does; it pushes data from your data warehouse back out to business applications. If Fivetran pulls data from those same applications, they should also enable users to push it back. I would love to do both ETL and reverse ETL in the same tool. It would be nice if Fivetran offered both their regular offering plus the reverse ETL option as well.
Ryan Ferdon - PeerSpot reviewer
Low-code makes development faster than with Python, but there were caching issues
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. It was kind of buggy sometimes. And when we ran the flow, it didn't go from a perceived start to end, node by node. Everything kicked off at once. That meant there were times when it would get ahead of itself and a job would fail. That was not because the job was wrong, but because Pentaho decided to go at everything at once, and something would process before it was supposed to. There were nodes you could add to make sure that, before this node kicks off, all these others have processed, but it was a bit tedious. There were also caching issues, and we had to write code to clear the cache every time we opened the program, because the cache would fill up and it wouldn't run. I don't know how hard that would be for them to fix, or if it was fixed in version 10. Also, the UI is a bit outdated, but I'm more of a fan of function over how something looks. One other thing that would have helped with Pentaho was documentation and support on the internet: how to do things, how to set up. I think there are some sites on how to install it, and Pentaho does have a help repository, but it wasn't always the most useful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Fivetran's most valuable feature is replication."
"Overall, I would rate Fivetran nine out of ten."
"Its arrays are powerful enough to handle migrations even when the replication is happening in the background, without causing any trouble with the ongoing traffic."
"For us, Fivetran has been able to scale both in terms of the data we bring into our warehouse and the amount of data that we use as well."
"Fivetran can perform data migration incredibly fast, depending on the source and target."
"It is easy for users to get accustomed to the tool due to its gentle learning curve and clear error transparency."
"Making the decision to implement Fivetran was supported by the fact that they have better connectors than other competitors."
"The product is very easy to use and very easy to configure."
"I find the drag and drop feature in Pentaho Data Integration very useful for integration."
"Sometimes, it took a whole team about two weeks to get all the data to prepare and present it. After the optimization of the data, it took about one to two hours to do the whole process. Therefore, it has helped a lot when you talk about money, because it doesn't take a whole team to do it, just one person to do one project at a time and run it when you want to run it. So, it has helped a lot on that side."
"The area where Lumada has helped us is in the commercial area. There are many extractions to compose reports about our sales team performance and production steps. Since we are using Lumada to gather data from each industry in each country. We can get data from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Colombia at the same time. We can then concentrate and consolidate it in only one place, like our data warehouse. This improves our production performance and need for information about the industry, production data, and commercial data."
"Pentaho Data Integration is quite simple to learn, and there is a lot of information available online."
"The abstraction is quite good."
"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 way it has improved our product is by giving our users the ability to do ad hoc reports, which is very important to our users. We can do predictive analysis on trends coming in for contracts, which is what our product does. The product helps users decide which way to go based on the predictive analysis done by Pentaho. Pentaho is not doing predictions, but reporting on the predictions that our product is doing. This is a big part of our product."
"I absolutely love Hitachi. I'm one of the forefront supporters of Hitachi for my firm. It's so easy to integrate within our environments. In terms of being able to quickly build ETL jobs, transform, and then automate them, it's really easy to integrate throughout for data analytics."
 

Cons

"The biggest area for improvement is in customization, particularly in how Fivetran socializes its tools."
"Fivetran would be improved by adding the ability to integrate the data from third-party APIs."
"HVR Software's technical support could be improved. Whenever we log a case, the response that we get from the support is a bit delayed."
"The customization could improve because Fivetran gives more thought to people who don't want to manage analytics workflows rather than engineers who want to be able to customize pipelines more thoroughly."
"The connections with SAP must be improved."
"It should have a few more monitoring functionalities."
"This solution needs to improve its real-time data and transformation availability."
"More connectors are needed for exotic, popular, and rising star portals."
"​There is not a data quality or MDM solution in the Pentaho DI suite.​"
"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."
"The product needs more plugins."
"I experience difficulties when handling millions of rows, as the data movement from one source to another becomes challenging."
"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."
"If you develop it on MacBook, it'll be quite a hassle."
"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."
"Parallel execution could be better in Pentaho. It's very simple but I don't think it works well."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would say they're a little bit on the expensive side, and their contract process is not particularly good, but there is a lot of potential flexibility."
"When you have a lot of workflows and complex use cases, pricing goes down as you use it more."
"In the first year, we were given a very good discount. It was approximately 20,000 Euros per year. In the third year, we purchased credit for two years and the price was 33,000 Euros per year."
"I've heard that the license for HVR is a bit costly compared to its competitors, but since it's reliable and efficient, I think the customer shouldn't be bothered about the cost."
"The solution is affordable."
"The product is reasonably expensive"
"I rate the pricing a six out of ten."
"The pricing model is okay and mid to large companies will not have an issue with it."
"I primarily work on the Community Version, which is available to use free of charge."
"I mostly used the open-source version. I didn't work with a license."
"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."
"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."
"When we first started with it, it was much cheaper. It has gone up drastically, especially since Hitachi bought out Pentaho."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
26%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What's the deal with the HVR software acquisition?
As a user of HVR Software I followed this deal closely. Fivetran is apparently trying to establish more in its sector and by buying an already established data replication software, they become som...
Does HVR Software provide reliable insights?
I honestly can't think of another data replication software that can give you better statistics and insight than HVR Software. There's the feature for topology and statistics and both of them can ...
How much traffic can HVR Software handle?
As someone who works at a company where a high volume of information is replicated and has tried several data replication softwares, I can tell you that you're looking at the right one. HVR Softwar...
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

No data available
Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Autodesk, Condé Nast, JetBlue, Morgan Stanley, OpenAI, LVMH, Pfizer, Verizon, SpotifyNational Australia Bank, Saks, Cemex, Okta, Dropbox, Pitney Bowes, World Fuel Services,Lufthansa, AutoZone, ASICS, ASOS, Coupa, Databricks, Hermes, New Relic, Intercom,Canva, Honeywell, Square, DocuSign, Nandos, Oldcastle Infrastructure
66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Find out what your peers are saying about Fivetran vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
845,589 professionals have used our research since 2012.