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Microsoft Power BI vs Pentaho
March 17, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
30★
Power BI transforms your company's data into rich visuals for you to collect and organize so you can focus on what matters to you. Stay in the know, spot trends as they happen, and push your business further.
8★
Open-source provider of reporting, analysis, dashboard, data mining and workflow capabilities. Easily access, manage and blend any data from any source. Turn data into insights and make information-driven decisions
Microsoft Power BI and Pentaho are, at first glance, remarkably similar. They both take large, unwieldy chunks of data, twist them into charts and dashboards and present them in a way that makes people nod thoughtfully in meetings. They both connect to an alarming number of databases, offer cloud and on-premises deployment (because nobody can quite decide where data should live) and generally exist to make spreadsheets seem a bit more sophisticated. In short, they do what all good BI tools do: take credit for the hard work of data engineers and present it as if it were obvious all along.
Power BI, being a creation of Microsoft and unleashed upon the world in 2015, is rather keen on being friendly. It seamlessly chats with Excel, Azure and any other Microsoft product that happens to be lying around. It’s designed for business folks who like their analytics served with a side of drag-and-drop convenience, requiring minimal effort and even less coding. There’s a free version, a paid version and a slightly more expensive paid version—because Microsoft enjoys a good subscription model almost as much as it enjoys renaming things. It even lets you ask it questions in plain English, which is lovely, except when it decides that “monthly sales trends” actually means “pie chart of despair.”
Pentaho, by contrast, has been around since 2004, which means it remembers a time when data was something you physically carried around on floppy disks. Originally an open-source marvel before being adopted by Hitachi Vantara, it has a reputation for being more powerful, more flexible and slightly more intimidating. It’s the kind of tool that engineers love because it lets them wrangle vast oceans of data, build intricate ETL pipelines and generally feel superior to mere dashboard-clickers. Customization is king here, but it does come at the cost of usability—unless you enjoy writing scripts in your spare time. While Power BI wants to make businesspeople feel like data wizards, Pentaho is for those who actually are.
See also: Top 10 Business Intelligence software
Power BI, being a creation of Microsoft and unleashed upon the world in 2015, is rather keen on being friendly. It seamlessly chats with Excel, Azure and any other Microsoft product that happens to be lying around. It’s designed for business folks who like their analytics served with a side of drag-and-drop convenience, requiring minimal effort and even less coding. There’s a free version, a paid version and a slightly more expensive paid version—because Microsoft enjoys a good subscription model almost as much as it enjoys renaming things. It even lets you ask it questions in plain English, which is lovely, except when it decides that “monthly sales trends” actually means “pie chart of despair.”
Pentaho, by contrast, has been around since 2004, which means it remembers a time when data was something you physically carried around on floppy disks. Originally an open-source marvel before being adopted by Hitachi Vantara, it has a reputation for being more powerful, more flexible and slightly more intimidating. It’s the kind of tool that engineers love because it lets them wrangle vast oceans of data, build intricate ETL pipelines and generally feel superior to mere dashboard-clickers. Customization is king here, but it does come at the cost of usability—unless you enjoy writing scripts in your spare time. While Power BI wants to make businesspeople feel like data wizards, Pentaho is for those who actually are.
See also: Top 10 Business Intelligence software
