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You can see Top 10 BI Tools for Small and Medium Businesses and Top 3 BI Tools for Small and Medium Businesses to look into details.
If you are a business owner and rely on spreadsheets for collecting big data that is prone to errors, you really need a BI tool to manage all data and reports. Any solid BI tool with a clean and intuitive UI allow you to build your own reports as well as have the flexibility to add dashboard. Pentaho is one such mighty business intelligence tool that does data integrations and analyze reports. Pentaho provides much more features than a mere open source BI. It includes online analytical processing, data mining, dashboarding etc. It helps you transform data into real information. Pentaho is now acquired by Hitachi group.
Editions and Pricing
Pentaho offers two editions, one is Pentaho business analytics and another one is Pentaho data Integration. The good thing about the editions is data integration is included in business analytics. Prices are pretty affordable and the free trial is limited to 30-day. The tool enables you to choose the features for specific needs of your business. Brilliant choice for small business.
Capabilities and Supporting Set of Features
Powerful Visualization
The tool depends on powerful visualizations that allow you to interact with your data, zooming in and seeing in detailed important statistics. It also allows you to get an insight of activities from clients or employees.
Reporting
Various ways of reporting solutions are included, ranging from self-service reporting to reporting for larger business jobs. Reports are intuitive and simple to use, and provide output in all popular formats, Excel, CSV, PDF, and HTML.
Data Integration
The tool can blend information together from unlimited sources, including NoSQL, Hadoop, and analytical databases. The integrated design is user-friendly, features a drag and drop facility, and has an adaptive big data layer so that big data can be quickly placed in.
Dashboard
Dashboards are interactive and include web-based drag and drop facility and a library of filter controls. The dashboards are customizable and can connect business analytics with outside applications.
Scatter charts and Geo-mapping
The tool has unique abilities such as Geo-mapping and scatters charts. It relies on in-memory data caching, which provides analysis of data very fast, making for a quicker BI tool.
Mobile Accessibility
The tool provides ease of implementation via mobile and tablets. The mobile apps are available in both iOS and android. The Mobile Apps are accessible through your mobile browser after downloading the tool.
Integration
The tool has integration with other useful business software from cloud-based apps to relationship management apps to marketing automation tools.
Support
Pentaho supports via many ways like user guides, knowledge base, video tutorials and documentations. The support is better than what other BI tools provide.
Pros and Cons of Pentaho
Pros
- You can subscribe to reports for delivery by email.
- The reporting feature delivers reports in multiple formats including Excel and PDF.
- High availability and customizable.
- Multi-language: The tool supports many languages such as French, German and Japanese.
Cons
- You have to be prepared to invest some effort in learning the product.
- No audit user activity to see which items have not been accessed for a long time.
Read Also: BI Tools product review – E commerce dashboard
Differentiator
Pentaho provides a rich end to end BI solution. The data integration module is exceptionally useful and powerful. You may need a higher level of IT skills to work with the tool. It is helpful to have SQL querying skills when creating reports. It is highly configurable. Pentaho rocks!
Pentaho stands itself out by some exceptional features like OLAP (online analytical processing) and ETL (extract, transform, and load).
For more details, please visit: Pentaho website.
You can find the detailed BI Tools product reviews for Tableau and TIBCO Spotfire for a quick comparison.
