

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and SAP Data Services are leading solutions in data management, each with distinct strengths. Pentaho stands out in user satisfaction, cost-effectiveness, and rapid deployment, while SAP Data Services excels with robust enterprise features and integration within SAP environments.
Features: Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is praised for its intuitive interface, open-source community support, and versatility in connecting with various data sources. It enables quick learning and implementation with minimal costs, ideal for small to medium businesses. SAP Data Services offers powerful ETL functionalities, excellent data migration options, and strong enterprise integration, favoring environments utilizing SAP systems, although it comes with higher costs.
Room for Improvement: Pentaho users suggest enhancements in heavy data load performance, additional built-in drivers, improved debugging tools, and a more user-friendly GUI for reports. Its open-source nature may lead to inconsistencies across tool updates. SAP Data Services users call for a better UI, improved integration with non-SAP products, enhanced handling of web services like JSON, and stronger cloud capabilities. The complexity and pricing of certain features are noted as areas needing enhancement.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pentaho supports diverse deployment methods including On-premises, Hybrid, and Public Cloud, with strong community support, though lacking dedicated support for its free version. Its enterprise editions receive favorable technical support ratings. SAP Data Services primarily supports On-premises with some hybrid capabilities and offers structured, but sometimes less responsive, customer support.
Pricing and ROI: Pentaho is noted for its affordability, with its free Community Edition providing significant ROI through reduced ETL development times and minimal operational expenses, appealing to budget-conscious organizations. SAP Data Services involves higher initial costs but delivers advanced capabilities that can justify the investment for large-scale implementations where enterprise-grade performance is pivotal.
I have seen a return on investment; my team was able to stay extremely small even though we had a lot of data integrations with many companies.
I can testify to the return on investment with metrics regarding time saved; we have increased our efficiency by about 20 to 30 percent due to the swift migration processes facilitated by the tool.
SAP is indeed good at all this now, with so many components such as SAP Signavio, SAP EINS, SAP Work Zone, SAP ALM, Cloud ALM, SAP public cloud, SAP private cloud, and BTP, all of which are essential to meet the latest cutting-edge technologies.
24/7 assistance is available for the Enterprise Edition.
take the time to understand our business requirements, offering appropriate recommendations.
Communication with the vendor is challenging
If you keep a high priority issue, such as a production impact, they certainly come and address it in no time.
The level three support is better because they know what they are doing.
It can be scaled well until you reach a point where you need to perform a lot of operations, and the issue arises when it runs out of memory to handle some data.
Pentaho Data Integration handles larger datasets better.
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics' scalability is commendable, as it allows us to scale up according to our needs.
If I were to rate it from one to 10, I would say it has a nine to 10 for scalability.
Performance issues arise due to reliance on a flowchart-based mechanism instead of scripts, which can lead to longer execution times.
I find that version 3.1 is the most stable version I have ever used.
It's pretty stable, however, it struggles when dealing with smaller amounts of data.
I would rate the stability of SAP Data Services as very stable, a ten.
We should also explore more effective partitioning for parallel processing and fine-tuning database connections to reduce load times and improve ETL speed.
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics can be improved by working with different environments, specifically the possibility to change the variables, meaning I write my variables only once and can change them for different environments such as production or development.
I also lack the option to use programming languages beyond Python and SQL, and a provision to incorporate Scala code in the scripting component would be beneficial.
Now, they are coming up with many pricing options, which is tricky; they offer one thing for free, but charge for nine others.
SAP Data Services does handle integration with third-party systems.
The documentation is not up to the mark.
I use the community version of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics, and I do not need additional costs.
The setup cost was minimal, and the pricing experience was pretty good.
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics has positively impacted my organization because it meant we didn't have to write a lot of custom API back-end processing logic; it did the majority of that heavy lifting for us.
It automates the data workflow, including extraction, cleansing, and loading into warehouses for BI reporting purposes, while also removing duplicates, validating data, and standardizing formats, enabling real-time decision-making.
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics has positively impacted my organization because it is easier to use, and my knowledge about this work facilitates the translation from the source to my final system.
SAP is indeed good at all this now, with so many components such as SAP Signavio, SAP EINS, SAP Work Zone, SAP ALM, Cloud ALM, SAP public cloud, SAP private cloud, and BTP, all of which are essential to meet the latest cutting-edge technologies.
SAP Data Services is mainly used for extraction of data, and it works with all databases.
It remains a fast data-moving tool, faster than most new ones.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| SAP Data Services | 1.5% |
| Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics | 1.5% |
| Other | 97.0% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 18 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 18 |
| Large Enterprise | 29 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 13 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 5 |
| Large Enterprise | 36 |
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.
SAP Data Services is a top-ranking data integration and data quality tool. This is a product that aims to provide its users with effective access to their data in order to transform it and connect it to various business processes. SAP Data Services offers companies detailed data insights which improve decision-making and make company operations more effective.
Organizations can increase the value of their structured and unstructured data with the functionalities of this product regarding data integration, quality, and cleansing. Through various components such as:
the product transforms data into a ready-to-use resource for business insights.
Some of the key components of SAP Data Services include:
Through these components, the product allows its clients to access and integrate data sources and targets with native connectors. Users can derive meaning from unstructured text data, match data to reduce duplicates, and see the impact of data quality issues. The tool also offers the option to enable parallel processing, bulk data loading, and grid computing for high-volume data loads.
SAP Data Services Features
The solution has different features for data integration, data quality, data profiling, and processing of text data. Using these features, clients can manage their company's data easily and achieve excellent results by optimizing it. Some of the product’s features include:
SAP Data Services Benefits
This solution offers various benefits to its clients regarding the efficient operation of their data. The key benefits of SAP Data Services include:
Reviews from Real Users
According to Michael Lutz, senior data warehouse developer at Fox Chase Cancer Center, SAP Data Services is a powerful tool that does a lot.
An associate consultant at a consultancy says the tool is easy to use, simple to implement, and offers very good mapping capabilities.
We monitor all Data Integration reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.