We performed a comparison between Pentaho Business Analytics and Windward Core based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in Reporting."I use the BI Server, CDE Dashboards, Saiku, and Kettle, because these tools are very good and highly experienced."
"Pentaho is an analytics platform that can be used when an organization has a lot of big data storage systems already installed and needs to manage and analyze that data. It has a specific use case for unstructured data, such as documents, and needs to be able to search and analyze it."
"Easy to use components to create the job."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' best features include the ease of developing data flows and the wide range of options to connect to databases, including those on the cloud."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of Pentaho is the Tableau report."
"We were able to install it without any assistance from tech support."
"One of the features that we have found most important is that the report builder is in Word, so it was very easy to get into it... We could also use some of our existing Word templates."
"Another thing our clients absolutely love is the ability to design templates within the Microsoft Office suite, because of how simple it is. They're building off of something that's familiar. When they can build off of that feature, on top of something that's very familiar, that's a plus for them."
"We can develop any report at least five times faster."
"It's very feature-rich. You can create tables, you can create graphs, you can import pictures, and those features are also easy to use."
"The Windward solution was very fast to rollout, and it is proven."
"For the designer we use AutoTag which is a Microsoft Word plugin. In general, it's easy to use, it doesn't have a very steep learning curve. It's not difficult, for people who know Microsoft Office well, to start using the AutoTag tool... It feels just like you're in a Microsoft Office environment with some extra functionality."
"We ended up going with Windward for the level of support we got from them during our proof of concept."
"The ability for users to have design and layout control is very important because it allows them control over the design and layout of their reports, without the help of IT."
"Logging capability is needed."
"The repository should be improved."
"Deployment is not simple. It is not simple because we are dealing with a lot of data; we are dealing with a lot of storage. So, it's not a simple process."
"Another concern is that Pentaho is not customizable or interactive."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' user interface is outdated."
"We did not achieve the ROI. The work delivered to users had lesser value than the subscription cost."
"Version control would be a good addition."
"Pentaho, at the general level, should greatly improve the easy construction of its dashboards and easy integration of information from different sources without technical user intervention."
"They could make the document creation performance faster. I'm not saying it's slow but it takes time to create the PDFs. If they could make it faster, that would be one area for improvement."
"It would be nice to have a black-and-white, ideal setup for servers, to maximize capabilities. We went through a lot of scenarios to get something that is scalable. An ideal AWS-package server setup could have saved us a lot of time. But I understand this is very company specific."
"It is software, so there are always times where things don't work. Most of the time issues happen when trying to move to a new version. There might be problems with reports that were created in an older version, so either we have to make a tweak to the templates or we report it to them and get them to make an adjustment to their software."
"There are some Excel formatting things that you lose when you implement a template: some default Excel validation scripts, macros. You could create them in Excel if you were just using Excel, but in creating a template that generates a report, some of those validation things are lost."
"I'm still working in Office 2016, and we have had some issues, but Windward is very quick to react when there is a problem. We are also going to switch over to Office 365 and that will solve a few of the problems."
"The error reports also need improvement. If you don't key it in right, it's a little hard to find the root cause. It gives you information as much as it can, but it doesn't really hone in and tell you explicitly what you should do to correct the problem."
"It needs better support for upgrades and more control over layout of elements. Upgrades tend to break existing output. Elements do not position where expected due to insertion of blank lines and page breaks. It takes time to fix these through trial and error."
"Is there any way to avoid AutoTag loading in Word/Excel each time? I need to use it from time to time - quite rarely. AutoTag affects performance of Word/Excel. I do not want to install/uninstall AutoTag each time I need it."
Earn 20 points
Pentaho Business Analytics is ranked 16th in Reporting with 42 reviews while Windward Core is ranked 24th in Reporting. Pentaho Business Analytics is rated 8.0, while Windward Core is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Pentaho Business Analytics writes "Flexible, easy to understand, and simple to set up". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Windward Core writes "It has streamlined a lot of our reporting processes". Pentaho Business Analytics is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Databricks, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, SAP Crystal Reports and Tableau, whereas Windward Core is most compared with Docmosis, SAP Crystal Reports, Nintex Document Generation, OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting and CA Easytrieve Report Generator.
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