CDE is a dashboard editor made by the Pentaho community. It is the de facto standard tool to design dashboards in the CE version of Pentaho. For the EE version, where a dashboard design tool is already available, it is another tool to choose to design a dashboard.
Another very important difference between the two tools is that the EE editor is really for end users to build simple dashboards. CDE is mainly targeted at developers and provides great flexibility, allowing for construction of very powerful and beautiful data visualizations taking full advantage of protovis. Moreover, these days Pedro Alves, the creator of CTools, announced the availability of CDE dashboards that support
Bootstrap (one of the most used responsive layout frameworks) and also the availability of chart components that use d3.js
(the next generation chart library born from the same creator of protovis). These are two other major steps that contribute once more to the wide adoption of...