Pentaho vs. SnapLogic

Pentaho is very well suited to perform data extraction & data mining from various cloud storage & transform that data using various available data models. However, the software struggles when it comes to visualizing the extracted data in an appealing manner & can be difficult for end-users to get an understanding of data tables created using those models.

Incentivized

Snaplogic is unique from other IPASS tools if you're very sensitive about data security as they have an on-premise option where your data never needs to leave your data center. And data pipelines can be quickly created if Snaplogic has the requisite connector to your data sources. On the downside, if you're transforming a large amount of data for example in training machine learning models, a tool with elastic compute capability is more appropriate.

• Integrate and synchronize with big data easily
• Import data from any sources and different databases
• Managing data in on-premise, hybrid and cloud environments.
• Compatibility and flexibility of the platform with any type of scenario and any business or industry
• Various tools in the software suite to transformation of data
• Simple interface appearance and creative UI graphics

• Their customer service response time is brilliant.
• SFTP tasks do a great job in reading the file directly from the server, instead of having to download it and then read it.
• Tasks expose the ability to run them using external job schedulers.
• Once you have a server up, setting up SnapLogic service does not take long. They have good documentation and customer support too.

Incentivized

• I think the relative obscurity of the tool is a downside, not as many developers, consultants or peers you can tap into.
• Lack of a solid user community held us back, looking at Power BI and Qlik, they have huge user communities that help each other out. Would have liked that here.
• Smaller company means smaller sales force, and the lack of a local presence made it hard to only interact online with the account rep. Other companies have someone local who often stops by with pre-sales developers to just pitch in free of charge when they have time.

Incentivized

• Git integration outside of Github (Bitbucket, and other git service providers)
• I would like to see an improved way to perform unit testing within the SnapLogic framework, as opposed to the manual approach
• I would prefer that the underlying source of SnapLogic pipelines be more human-readable, although it is a GUI approach to authoring pipelines

Incentivized

I will use Pentaho until I find a better tool with a better, easier to use report designer client. For now, Pentaho has been the most powerful reporting tool for our clients because of its ability to connect to Odoo, integrate in Odoo (reports are accessible in Odoo) and the flexibility in report design and parameter integration

Incentivized

This has been hands down the BEST software company I have ever used and dealt with. I am a 25 year IT veteran at this college. They go above and beyond in soliciting our feedback/input and proactively follow up about bugs, issues, etc. I have given multiple potential clients my thoughts and after seeing the SL demo they all sign up. I appreciate their support model, it's REFRESHING!

Incentivized

Even if Pentaho requires less technical skills to develop a pipeline or ETL project, its learning curve can be a bit slow since there are many ways to do the same thing as in any other platform. However, in Pentaho, some things can be confusing some moments for non-technical teams.

Incentivized

It is very powerful but has a steep learning curve

Incentivized

We are an Enterprise customer. They handle problems INSTANTLY when they are critical, including initiation an immediate WebEx screen share call when needed. Smaller/less-critical problems are handled within 1-2 days -- and NEVER fall off their radar, no matter how small. As needed, we can also leverage "professional services" from them -- much of which is included in our Enterprise contract. Finally, when a problem I have discovered turns out to be a bug..they create a JIRA for the fix, and make me a watcher. I love seeing notes come in showing me status updates of bugs filed because of something I found. They really are TOP-NOTCH.

They can be prompt but they have not been as useful as I've wanted. We had a bug that affected many of our customers through an API connection between SnapLogic and our platform. Eventually they were able to figure it out, but it took a long time of negotiating between our engineering team and theirs. Additionally, we installed the SnapLogic groundplex for our customers and we've run into a bunch of problems of connectivity. If SnapLogic offered to be on those calls with our clients to troubleshoot how to fix these problems, I would give them a better grade here.

Incentivized

Course Taken: DI1000 Pentaho Data Integration Fundamentals Setup A week before your class started, the instructor will start sending out class material and lab setup instructions. This is helpful so that you understand how the environment is laid out and can start reviewing the content. Ultimately it saved about a 1/2 day trying to setup with 10 other people online which was great! The Course The 3-day course was laid out like many other technical classes with 15-30 minutes instruction and 15-60 minutes of lab exercises. The instructor was very knowledgeable with the functionality from version to version and answered questions as we went along. I was amazed at some of the functionality that was available that I was not using at the time and quickly implemented changes to many existing transformations and jobs. The novice users seemed to catch on quickly and more experienced users explained how some of the functionality was used in their home environments. Towards the end there was enough time so that we were able to ask very directed questions about our own environments. Overall, I really found the class to be informative and deliver enough information to be dangerous. My skills improved and I was able to design better and efficient transformations for the HIE. Course Description: https://training.pentaho.com/instructor-led-training/pentaho-data-integration-fundamentals-di1000

Get the right people in before starting implementation. Start small and build as you go approach is time consuming and involves lot of rework. Evangalize within the organization the capabilities and limitations equally so that correct delivery expectations are set. Set expectations with the Customer that the tool cannot replace proprietary software in terms of stability/usability and that timelines could change given the new ness of the product.

Incentivized

The groundplex in our VPC is very nice for security reasons and the SnapLogic team was extremely helpful during our implementation

Incentivized

Perhaps Snowflake and SalesForce have some components which align with the Pentaho tools. The Pentaho tools have integrations with these technologies to add more value to the final users. Perhaps the only weakness I can honestly find in the Pentaho tools right now is the lack of a powerful web interface for data transformations. There is a web component from which you can access existing data transformations created with the Pentaho Data Integration tool. Still, the web component only allows visualization of the data transformation and remote execution. A complete web interface with remote execution would be excellent, and I'm sure that we might see something like this available at some point in the future.

Incentivized

Boomi was our runner-up product. The pricing model was much higher and cost-prohibitive. They were not as flexible with pricing on a non-profit higher education institution. We did love their integration code library shared across all clients. The user interface was on par with Snaplogic as well as the features that come included. Overall, seemed like a solid product just found something better for a lower price point.

Incentivized

• Pentaho has improved our overall business process.
• Pentaho has helped the Managers and Directors to analyze the numbers going up and down from time to time.
• We have a started a big project using Pentaho that is going to include all the business processes in the organization.

Incentivized

• We had a positive impact at our organization where handful of developers were able to integrate more than 50 systems in less than a year. It has helped us a lot by providing access to data that was previously not possible or unimaginable or get in such easy format.
• The only place where it didn't have a positive impact was for a realtime application integration project requiring on the fly aggregations, wherein this tool claimed it could do it but wasn't able to.

Incentivized