FME vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

Safe Software and Hitachi Vantara are both solutions in the Data Integration category. Safe Software is ranked #26 with an average rating of 8.7, while Hitachi Vantara is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.7. Safe Software holds a 1.8% mindshare in DI, compared to Hitachi Vantara’s 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Safe Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

FME

Read 5 FME reviews

2,503 Views
1,829 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Read 53 Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics reviews

2,102 Views
1,065 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

FME

Pentaho Data Integration an...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Pentaho Data Integration and FME compete in data integration and transformation categories. Pentaho generally has an advantage with its pricing and customer support, while FME's feature set aligns with its premium pricing.

Features: Pentaho provides capabilities like data blending, reporting, and OLAP services, making it suitable for comprehensive data analytics. FME excels in spatial data processing, providing robust integration with geographic formats.

Room for Improvement: Pentaho could benefit from enhancing its spatial data handling capabilities, expanding its free version features, and improving its UI for more intuitive use. FME might improve by offering more flexible pricing options, simplifying its learning curve for non-technical users, and expanding its customer service options beyond self-support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pentaho features a flexible deployment that integrates easily with existing systems and offers supportive customer service for troubleshooting. FME's deployment is streamlined, particularly for geographic systems, but leans on self-service support.

Pricing and ROI: Pentaho is more affordable, offering strong ROI for extensive data integration on a budget, appealing to small to medium enterprises with cost-effective licensing. FME, despite its higher cost, delivers substantial ROI for industries with complex spatial data needs, justifying its premium through advanced features and integration options.

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

Buyer's Guide

FME vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

February 2025

Download the complete report

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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

FME

Ranking in Data Integration

26th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Ranking in Data Integration

22nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of FME is 1.8%, up from 1.5% 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

Alan Bloor

Geographic Information System Developer at Public Sector

Great for handling large volumes of data, but it is priced a bit high

When I do coding, I think about every single function. Some of these functions can be very elementary, like doing a substring or some capitalization. But FME removes all that coding because it's a transformer, so the time to develop an application to get to a point where you're producing results is decreased massively. It used to take weeks and months to develop software, and now I can use something like FME, and within one day, we get results. We can look at and validate data. We make minor subtle changes to the workbenches to improve it. We can share the workbenches. We don't have to use GitHub or anything else.

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Ryan Ferdon

Senior Data Engineer at Burgiss

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.

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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 most valuable feature of FME is the graphical user interface. There is nothing better. It is very easy to debug because you can see all steps where there are failures. Overall the software is easy to optimize a process."

"It has standard plug-ins available for different data sources."

"We make minor subtle changes to the workbenches to improve it. We can share the workbenches. We don't have to use GitHub or anything else."

"It has a very friendly user interface. You don't need to use a lot of code. For us that's the most important aspect about it. Also, it has a lot of connectors and few forms. It has a strong facial aspect. It can do a lot of facial analysis."

"All spatial features are unrivaled, and the possibility to execute them based on a scheduled trigger, manual, e-mail, Websocket, tweet, file/directory change or virtually any trigger is most valuable."

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

"The product is user-friendly and intuitive"

"One of the most valuable features is the ability to create many API integrations. I'm always working with advertising agents and using Facebook and Instagram to do campaigns. We use Pentaho to get the results from these campaigns and to create dashboards to analyze the results."

"It has improved our data integration capabilities."

"We're using the PDI and the repository function, and they give us the ability to easily generate reporting and output, and to access data. We also like the ability to schedule."

"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."

"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."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pros

Cons

"FME can improve the geographical transformation. I've had some problems with the geographical transformations, but it's probably mostly because I'm not the most skilled geographer in-house. The solution requires some in-depth knowledge to perform some functions."

"The one thing that always appears in the community is the ability to make really easy loops to loop through data efficiently. That needs to be added at some point."

"FME's price needs improvement for the African market."

"Improvements could be made to mapping presentations."

"To get a higher rating, it would have to improve the price and the associated scalability. These are the main issues."

"Since Hitachi took over, I don't feel that the documentation is as good within the solution. It used to have very good help built right in."

"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."

"Its basic functionality doesn't need a whole lot of change. There could be some improvement in the consistency of the behavior of different transformation steps. The software did start as open-source and a lot of the fundamental, everyday transformation steps that you use when building ETL jobs were developed by different people. It is not a seamless paradigm. A table input step has a different way of thinking than a data merge step."

"I experience difficulties when handling millions of rows, as the data movement from one source to another becomes challenging."

"In the Community edition, it would be nice to have more modules that allow you to code directly within the application. It could have R or Python completely integrated into it, but this could also be because I'm using an older version."

"While Pentaho Data Integration is very friendly, it is not very useful when there isn't a lot of data to handle."

"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."

"There is not a data quality or MDM solution in the Pentaho DI suite."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We used the standard licensing for our use of FME. The cost was approximately €15,000 annually. We always welcome less expensive solutions, if the solution could be less expensive it would be helpful."

"The product's price is reasonable."

"FME Server used to cost £10,000; now it can cost over £100,000."

"When we first started with it, it was much cheaper. It has gone up drastically, especially since Hitachi bought out Pentaho."

"The price of the regular version is not reasonable and it should be lower."

"I use it because it is free. I download from their page for free. I don't have to pay for a license. With other tools, I have to pay for the licenses. That is why I use Pentaho."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

30%

Energy/Utilities Company

13%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

16%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about FME?

We make minor subtle changes to the workbenches to improve it. We can share the workbenches. We don't have to use GitHub or anything else.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FME?

The pricing is really bad. Last year, they rebranded the whole pricing structure. It used to be moderately priced at about £400 per user per year. Now they've changed the whole thing, and it's expe...

See all answers

What needs improvement with FME?

The one thing that always appears in the community is the ability to make really easy loops to loop through data efficiently. That needs to be added at some point. There must be a technical or comm...

See all answers

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

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

FME

March 2025

Download FME product report

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

March 2025

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

FME is the data integration platform with the best support for spatial data. Run workflows on the desktop or deploy them in a server or cloud environment.

Safe Software

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

Shell, US Department of Commerce, PG&E, BC Hydro, City of Vancouver, Enel, Iowa DoT, San Antonio Water System

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

Buyer's Guide

FME vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

February 2025

Free Report: FME vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

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