Pentaho Pricing Guide 2026: Costs & Plans Broken Down
Pentaho lists four tiers and no prices. What each tier includes, what happened to the free edition, the change of owner, and how to get a quote you can compare.
Pentaho doesn’t publish a price on its own site. Its pricing page lists four tiers of Pentaho Data Integration, Starter, Standard, Premium and Enterprise, with no figure against any of them, so every Pentaho deal starts with a quote. The free Community Edition is no longer offered to businesses, and what replaced it is a 30-day trial. The one place Pentaho does list a price is AWS Marketplace, where Pentaho Data Integration costs from $3.57 an hour.
Pentaho has also changed hands this year. Below I go through what each tier includes, what happened to the free edition and the owner, and what to ask so the quote you get can be compared with anything else.
Checked on 2 October 2026 against Pentaho’s pricing page, which lists tiers but no prices, and Pentaho’s Developer Edition page.
The short answer
Pentaho pricing is quote-only. Pentaho Data Integration comes in four tiers (Starter, Standard, Premium and Enterprise) with no prices on Pentaho’s site, and a free 30-day trial. On AWS Marketplace it’s billed by the hour, from $3.57 on the smallest machine. The free Developer Edition is only for students and universities, and Pentaho Business Analytics, Data Catalog and Data Optimizer are licensed separately. Mammoth publishes every plan: free to start, paid from $39/month billed annually.
Pentaho’s Four Tiers
Each tier below is Pentaho Data Integration, Pentaho’s ETL tool. The descriptions are Pentaho’s own, and none of them carries a price.
| Tier | What Pentaho says it’s for | Support | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | Core integration tools, for light, one-time workloads | Limited | Quote |
| Standard | Scalable integration with containerization and room to grow | Unlimited | Quote |
| Premium | Growing complexity, with expanded integration for AI-ready data operations | 24/7 | Quote |
| Enterprise | Pentaho’s most complete tier, for large-scale, high-impact data environments | Pentaho’s fullest | Quote |
Read the descriptions and the tiers mostly differ in support, not in what the software does. Starter comes with limited support, Standard with unlimited support and Premium with support around the clock. If your pipelines run overnight and a failure has to be fixed before the morning report goes out, that’s the line that will decide your tier.
Starter is also described as being for one-time work. A team that runs Pentaho jobs on a schedule every day should expect to be quoted Standard or above.
The one published price: AWS Marketplace
Pentaho Data Integration is listed on AWS Marketplace to run in your own AWS account. It’s billed by the hour for the machine size you pick, and AWS charges for the machine itself on top:
| AWS machine size | Pentaho software, per hour |
|---|---|
| m5.large | $3.57 |
| m5.xlarge | $7.13 |
| m5.2xlarge | $12.49 |
| m5.4xlarge | $21.83 |
| m5.8xlarge | $36.53 |
Running the smallest size around the clock comes to about $2,606 a month, or $31,273 a year, for the Pentaho software alone. Running it only for an eight-hour working day, about 174 hours a month, comes to about $621. A 365-day contract saves up to 20%, and the 30-day free trial applies here too.
What’s priced separately
Pentaho licenses three more products on their own terms: Pentaho Business Analytics for reports and dashboards, Pentaho Data Catalog for finding and tagging data, and Pentaho Data Optimizer for tiering storage. A quote for Pentaho Data Integration doesn’t include dashboards. If you need them, ask for Business Analytics on the same quote, or you’ll be comparing half a stack with a whole one.
What Happened to the Free Edition
Pentaho used to be free to start. The Community Edition ran self-hosted at no cost, and it’s why many small teams picked Pentaho in the first place.
That route is closed to businesses. Pentaho’s Developer Edition page says it “is only available for Students & Universities”, through its Academic Access Program, and points companies to a free trial of Pentaho Data Integration instead. When I checked on 8 September 2026, the SourceForge project that used to host the Community Edition also pointed to that trial.
Existing Community Edition installs keep running. A business starting on Pentaho today begins with the 30-day trial and then a quote.
Pentaho Has Changed Owners
Hitachi Data Systems bought Pentaho in 2015, and it became part of Hitachi Vantara in 2017. That’s no longer the arrangement. Pentaho’s own site now names Pentaho Canada Inc. as the owner of its trademark, and Wikipedia and trade reports say LEO Software, part of Constellation Software, bought Pentaho in June 2026.
I couldn’t find an announcement of the sale from Pentaho, LEO Software or Hitachi, so treat the details as reported rather than confirmed. Pentaho’s AWS Marketplace listing still names Hitachi Vantara LLC as the seller. The practical point for a buyer doesn’t depend on them: ask in writing which company you’re contracting with, and whether your support terms and the product roadmap carry over from the Hitachi years.
What a Pentaho Quote Depends On
With no published prices, these are the choices a quote is built from:
- The tier, which is mostly the support level you need
- The products: Data Integration alone, or with Business Analytics, Data Catalog or Data Optimizer
- Deployment: Pentaho runs on-premises, in the cloud or in a mix of both, and who hosts it changes what you pay for
- The billing unit: Pentaho’s pricing page doesn’t say whether it counts users, servers or processing cores
That last one is the first thing to ask. Two quotes can’t be compared until you know what each one is counting.
Holding a Pentaho quote? Book 15 minutes with the Mammoth team. Bring the quote and your user count, and see the same work priced in Mammoth.
How to Get a Quote You Can Compare
- Start the trial. Pentaho offers a free 30-day trial of Pentaho Data Integration. Build one real pipeline in it, so you know which tier’s support you’d need.
- Request the quote through Pentaho’s demo page, with your requirements written down: the products you need, how many people build jobs, how many view reports, and where it will run.
- Ask these in writing:
- What is the billing unit: users, servers or cores?
- Which tier does our support need, and what does the next tier up add?
- Are Business Analytics and any connectors we need included, or quoted separately?
- Which company are we contracting with, and what happens to existing Hitachi-era agreements?
- What does the price do at renewal?
When Pentaho Still Makes Sense
You’re already invested. Years of Pentaho jobs in production and people who know them can make staying cheaper than moving.
You already run the Community Edition. An existing install keeps running at $0. That argues for staying put, not for starting.
You use its OLAP analysis. Pentaho Business Analytics includes OLAP services, the cube-style slicing of figures by dimension. If your reports rely on it, check that any replacement does the same before you move.
You have to run on-premises. Pentaho runs on your own servers, which matters if cloud tools are ruled out.
When to Look Elsewhere
If you’re starting fresh and want to know the price before a sales call, Pentaho can’t tell you, and the change of owner adds a question about the roadmap that nobody can answer yet. Both are reasons to put a tool with published pricing on the shortlist beside it.
I compare eight of them in Pentaho alternatives. The usual names:
- Open source: Apache NiFi and Airbyte, both free to self-host
- Enterprise ETL: Talend (Talend pricing) and Matillion (Matillion pricing)
- No-code preparation: Mammoth prepares and combines data without code and publishes dashboards with unlimited free viewers, from a free plan to $39/month on Starter, billed annually
Talend’s free Open Studio was retired in January 2024, so it isn’t the free fallback it once was.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does Pentaho cost?
Pentaho’s own pricing page lists four tiers of Pentaho Data Integration (Starter, Standard, Premium and Enterprise) and quotes every one. The only published price is on AWS Marketplace, where Pentaho Data Integration costs $3.57 to $36.53 an hour depending on machine size, plus AWS’s own charge. A free 30-day trial is available either way.
Is Pentaho free?
Not for businesses. The free Community Edition is no longer offered to them, and the free Developer Edition is only available to students and universities. A company can try Pentaho Data Integration free for 30 days, then needs a paid licence.
Who acquired Pentaho?
Hitachi Data Systems bought Pentaho in 2015, and it became part of Hitachi Vantara in 2017. Wikipedia and trade reports say LEO Software, part of Constellation Software, bought it in June 2026, and Pentaho’s site now names Pentaho Canada Inc. as its trademark owner.
What does Pentaho do?
Pentaho is data integration and business analytics software. Its two main products are Pentaho Data Integration, which moves and reshapes data between systems, and Pentaho Business Analytics, which covers reporting, dashboards and OLAP analysis on top of it.
Is Pentaho an ETL tool?
Yes. Pentaho Data Integration, formerly known as Kettle, is an ETL tool: you design extract, transform and load jobs in a graphical editor called Spoon and run them on a server or as standalone processes.
Is Pentaho better than Tableau?
They do different jobs. Pentaho Data Integration moves and reshapes data, while Tableau builds dashboards on data that’s already prepared. Only Pentaho Business Analytics overlaps with Tableau, and if you need both jobs done the two can work together: Pentaho to prepare the data, Tableau to show it.
Related Reading
- Pentaho Alternatives – Eight tools compared
- Best ETL Tools – Platform comparison
- Talend Pricing – A Pentaho alternative, priced
- Data Pipeline Software – Open source vs commercial
