What's New in Pentaho 11 for PDI Developers (and Should You Upgrade from 9.x or 10.x?)

Pentaho 11 is the new long-term support (LTS) release of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics, following 10.2 from August 2024. Most of the headlines are about the server and the user console, so in this post I focus only on what matters to PDI developers: what changes in your day-to-day work, what might break, and whether you should upgrade from 9.x or 10.x now.

If you have not installed it yet, start with my PDI 11 installation guide.

1. Pipeline Designer: build transformations in the browser

The biggest visible change is Pipeline Designer, a browser-based editor for transformations and jobs. It works much like Spoon, but runs on a modern web UI, so you can build and edit pipelines without installing Spoon on every developer machine.

The important part for existing projects: it is compatible with the .ktr and .kjb files you already built in Spoon. Spoon is not going away, and you can mix the two. My take: keep using Spoon for heavy development and debugging for now, and try Pipeline Designer for quick edits and for team members who should not need a desktop install.

How to Install Pentaho Data Integration 11 on Windows, Mac and Linux (2026)

Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) 11 is the current long-term support release of Pentaho. A lot has changed since my PDI 7.0 install guide and the CE 9.3 guide for Mac. The Java requirement is different, the free Community Edition is gone in its old form, and the client is over 1 GB smaller.

This post walks through getting PDI 11 running on Windows, macOS and Linux, plus the errors you are most likely to hit on the way.

What changed in PDI 11 (for installers)

• Java 21. Oracle Java 21 and OpenJDK 21 are the certified runtimes. Java 17 (Oracle, OpenJDK, Temurin, Azul Zulu) is still supported. Java 8 and Java 11 setups from older installs will not do.
• No more Karaf/OSGi. It has been removed from PDI completely. Big data components (Hadoop, etc.) are now ordinary plugins instead of a separate add-on, which is why the download is much smaller.
• Plugin Manager. New features ship as plugins, managed from one place.
• Pipeline Designer. A browser-based editor for transformations and jobs, compatible with files built in Spoon. Spoon is still the desktop client covered here.
• LTS release. Version 11.0 is supported until at least mid-2029, while 9.3 went out of support on July 1, 2026. If you are still on 9.x, now is the time to plan the move.