ReportPortal vs. Pentaho Mondrian

Pentaho is a commercial OpenSource solution. It has a community version and a paid version.

Paid version, comparing to RP is much more expensive, I would say almost 3 times more expensive.

Community Edition as you know is free, but it always lacks documentation. there's a wiki where you can find information, but 95% of chances that what you're looking for is not documented.

Basically, it's a J2EE solution, where there's a lot to code to be able to have a decent solution.

There's no real physical cube, as you know, but a relational database which is queried by Mondrian, an Olap Server that generates MDX sentences based in user interaction (it uses a tool called J-Olap Client). Mondrian takes that MDX query and converts it to pure SQL which is passed finally to the relational engine, which can be SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.

In general, I would use Pentaho for small projects and companies that do not care about support and documentation and internal training (companies so small that they do not have IT people). But real customers want to learn and manage their solution by themselves, and they crash against the wall of lacking decent documentation and on time support.

Regarding costs of licenses (Windows Server, SQL Server, RP), when you use commercial Opensource, you spend so much money in engineering hours and support that the projects become almost even. and with MS/XMLA you get almost instant support and have a lot of documentation.

This Article (in Spanish) states that Pentaho's new CEO wants to close the product in favor of their EE (Enterprise Edition, which is paid). This new is from October 2011, so it's quite updated.

The leader in OpenSource BI is making NO MONEY with the community edition (no paid support and/or training for CE users). the rest should be in the same path. no company can live without income. All developments are in EE not in the CE (Community Edition).