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Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics vs Qlik Compose 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

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
Qlik Compose
Ranking in Data Integration
58th
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 November 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.9%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qlik Compose is 0.8%, down from 0.9% 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%
Qlik Compose0.8%
Other97.3%
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.
SA
Director - Metrics & Analytics at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Efficient data warehouse automation with robust features, but may require enhancements in user-friendly self-service options and pricing flexibility for broader corporate appeal
It could enhance its capabilities in the realm of self-service options as currently, it is more suited for individuals with technical proficiency who can create pages using it. When it comes to end users who may lack technical expertise, they are limited to toggling between existing developments. To empower end users to make critical changes without relying heavily on technical expertise, it would be beneficial to introduce more user-friendly features for development and modification. If it could incorporate correlation analysis capabilities into its platform, especially in a user-friendly manner, it would greatly enhance the tool's overall utility and make it an even more outstanding solution. There is a room for improvement regarding stability.

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 thing for me is that it enables a technical product manager to be able to write ETL jobs themselves, which saves developers time so that they can do more important things."
"When we get a question from our CEO that needs a response and that requires a little bit of legwork of pulling in from various market data, our own in-house repositories, and everything else, it allows me to arrive at the solutions much faster than having to do it through scripting in Python, coding, or anything else."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would say this is the best ETL tool in the market, considering this is open source and ease to use, very nice GUI."
"Data transformation within Pentaho is a nice feature that they have and that I value."
"It allows for rapid prototyping of a wide array of ETL workloads."
"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."
"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."
"It's a stable solution."
"Qlik Compose is good enough. It is user-friendly and intuitive."
"As long as you pick the solution that best fits with your requirements, you won't find that performance is a problem. It's good."
"One of the most valuable features was the ability to integrate multiple source systems that mainly used structured IDBMS versions."
"The most valuable is its excellence as a graphical data representation tool and the versatility it offers, especially with drill-down capabilities."
"I have found it to be a very good, stable, and strong product."
 

Cons

"I work with different databases. I would like to work with more connectors to new databases, e.g., DynamoDB and MariaDB, and new cloud solutions, e.g., AWS, Azure, and GCP. If they had these connectors, that would be great. They could improve by building new connectors. If you have native connections to different databases, then you can make instructions more efficient and in a more natural way. You don't have to write any scripts to use that connector."
"The only complaint that I have with Pentaho has been with scaling."
"Searching repository for reports or dashboards"
"They could improve the logging generator. Sometimes the error description is so generic that it is not possible to detect the problem."
"Its UI is probably a bit too confusing for that level of user, so it doesn't allow us to get the tool as widely distributed across the organization to non-technical users as much as we would like."
"Upgrading the bi-platform is a little pain, but the rest is easy to use and to set up."
"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."
"The User Console, aka workspace, and the development of dashboards work but they require some programmer skills, which means continuous application management on behalf of the IT department."
"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."
"I'd like to have access to more developer training materials."
"The solution has room for improvement in the ETL. They have an ETL, but when it comes to the monitoring portion, Qlik Compose doesn't provide a feature for monitoring."
"For more complex work, we are not using Qlik Compose because it cannot handle very high volumes at the moment. It needs the same batching capabilities that other ETL tools have. We can't batch the data into small chunks when transforming large amounts of data. It tries to do everything in one shot and that's where it fails."
"There should be proper documentation available for the implementation process."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The price of the regular version is not reasonable and it should be lower."
"I primarily work on the Community Version, which is available to use free of charge."
"When we first started with it, it was much cheaper. It has gone up drastically, especially since Hitachi bought out Pentaho."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive, I rate the solution a six."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"While they outperform Tableau, there's room for improvement in Qlik's pricing structures, especially for corporate clients like us."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
8%
Educational Organization
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise17
Large Enterprise32
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: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.