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Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs Qlik Compose 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

Pentaho Data Integration an...
Ranking in Data Integration
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Qlik Compose
Ranking in Data Integration
45th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.5%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qlik Compose is 0.9%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics1.5%
Qlik Compose0.9%
Other97.6%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Sahil Taneja - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant/Manager at Tenzing
Easy matching and reconciliation of data
The initial setup was easy for the data warehousing concept. But for a person who is new to ETL and warehousing concepts, it may take some time. If someone is familiar with these concepts, they could understand and learn the tool quickly. However, compared to other tools, the UI is complex. It would be helpful to have a better UI and documentation for new users. As of now, there is a challenge in learning the Compose tool for new users altogether. Qlik Compose was deployed on-premises. But the servers, like the SQL servers were maintained on the cloud—the managed instances.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The abstraction is quite good."
"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."
"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 amount of data that it loads and processes is good."
"It has a really friendly user interface, which is its main feature. The process of automating or combining SQL code with some databases and doing the automation is great and really convenient."
"Lumada has allowed us to interact with our employees more effectively and compensate them properly. One of the cool things is that we use it to generate commissions for our salespeople and bonuses for our warehouse people. It allows us to get information out to them in a timely fashion. We can also see where they're at and how they're doing."
"Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics has positively impacted my organization by saving costs, managing large data sets, and integrating multiple sources."
"One of the most valuable features was the ability to integrate multiple source systems that mainly used structured IDBMS versions."
"I have found it to be a very good, stable, and strong product."
"There were many valuable features, such as extracting any data to put in the cloud. For example, Qlik was able to gather data from SAP and extract SAP data from the platforms."
"The technical support is very good. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"It is a scalable solution."
"One of the most valuable features of this tool is its automation capabilities, allowing us to design the warehouse in an automated manner. Additionally, we can generate Data Lifecycle Policies (DLP) reports and efficiently implement updates and best practices based on proven design patterns."
"I like modeling and code generation. It has become a pretty handy tool because of its short ideation to delivery time. From the time you decide you are modeling a data warehouse, and once you finish the modeling, it generates all the code, generates all the tables. All you have to do is tick a few things, and you can produce a fully functional warehouse. I also like that they have added all the features I have asked for over four years."
"It can scale."
 

Cons

"One thing that I don't like, just a little, is the backward compatibility."
"I would like to see more improvements with AS400 DB2."
"The testing and quality could really improve. Every time that there is a major release, we are very nervous about what is going to get broken. We have had a lot of experience with that, as even the latest one was broken. Some basic things get broken. That doesn't look good for Hitachi at all. If there is one place I would advise them to spend some money and do some effort, it is with the quality. It is not that hard to start putting in some unit tests so basic things don't get broken when they do a new release. That just looks horrible, especially for an organization like Hitachi."
"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."
"Parallel execution could be better in Pentaho. It's very simple but I don't think it works well."
"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."
"Regarding the features, I find many issues using Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics when working with different environments, especially development environments and production environments, where I have faced many issues working with two environments."
"I'd like to have access to more developer training materials."
"There is some scope for improvement around the documentation, and a better UI would definitely help."
"There should be proper documentation available for the implementation process."
"Qlik's ETL and data transformation could be better."
"My issues with the solution's stability are owing to the fact that it has certain bugs causing issues in some functionalities that should be working."
"I believe that visual data flow management and the transformation function should be improved."
"There could be more customization options."
"It would be better if the first level of technical support were a bit more technically knowledgeable to solve the problem. I think they could also improve the injection of custom scripts. It is pretty difficult to add additional scripts. If the modeling doesn't give you what you want, and you want to change the script generated by the modeling, it is a bit more challenging than in most other products. It is very good with standard form type systems, but if you get a more complicated data paradigm, it tends to struggle with transforming that into a model."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a good open source option (Community Edition)​."
"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"
"I primarily work on the Community Version, which is available to use free of charge."
"You don't need the Enterprise Edition, you can go with the Community Edition. That way you can use it for free and, for free, it's a pretty good tool to use."
"There was a cost analysis done and Pentaho did favorably in terms of cost."
"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."
"I mostly used the open-source version. I didn't work with a license."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive, I rate the solution a six."
"While they outperform Tableau, there's room for improvement in Qlik's pricing structures, especially for corporate clients like us."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Educational Organization
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Which ETL tool would you recommend to populate data from OLTP to OLAP?
There are two products I know about * TimeXtender : Microsoft based, Transformation logic is quiet good and can easily be extended with T-SQL , Has a semantic layer that generates metat data for cu...
 

Also Known As

Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
Compose, Attunity Compose
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Poly-Wood
Find out what your peers are saying about Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs. Qlik Compose and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.