We performed a comparison between Databricks and Informatica PowerCenter based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: PeerSpot users consistently feel Databricks is a more complete solution, providing better integrations, features, and ease of use. The cloud-based architecture makes scaling seamless.
"Databricks has a scalable Spark cluster creation process. The creators of Databricks are also the creators of Spark, and they are the industry leaders in terms of performance."
"We like that this solution can handle a wide variety and velocity of data engineering, either in batch mode or real-time."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is its notebook. It's quite convenient to use, both terms of the research and the development and also the final deployment, I can just declare the spark jobs by the load tables. It's quite convenient."
"Databricks is a scalable solution. It is the largest advantage of the solution."
"The processing capacity is tremendous in the database."
"I like the ability to use workspaces with other colleagues because you can work together even without seeing the other team's job."
"The main features of the solution are efficiency."
"A very valuable feature is the data processing, and the solution is specifically good at using the Spark ecosystem."
"The solution is stable."
"I like the automated scheduling feature."
"The performance and design of Informatica have been very valuable. I find the performance faster than, say, Oracle Data Integrator or DataStage."
"Technical support, and their approach is good. They have a support portal and support tickets. If you open a ticket it has multiple levels of severity from level one to very high or critical."
"The greatest feature is that it is very easy to have someone come in and jump right in. It is one of the nicest tools in terms of getting a person acquainted quickly."
"Informatica PowerCenter is very good for integrating a huge amount of data in a very short duration, such as a minute. It is also very easy to use. After you provide the source and the target, mappings are automatically done, which makes it easy to use for the development team."
"Good product if you are trying implement data quality, data integration, and data management projects."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"The stability of the clusters or the instances of Databricks would be better if it was a much more stable environment. We've had issues with crashes."
"When I used the support, I had communication problems because of the language barrier with the agent. The accent was difficult to understand."
"I would like to see the integration between Databricks and MLflow improved. It is quite hard to train multiple models in parallel in the distributed fashions. You hit rate limits on the clients very fast."
"There would also be benefits if more options were available for workers, or the clusters of the two points."
"There are no direct connectors — they are very limited."
"It would be great if Databricks could integrate all the cloud platforms."
"The product needs samples and templates to help invite users to see results and understand what the product can do."
"Would be helpful to have additional licensing options."
"It should be more cloud-centric than on-prem-centric."
"Unstructured data handling is an important area with a shortcoming that needs improvement in the solution."
"The initial setup is not straightforward. You need expertise to do it."
"I found it is kind of weird that not all of the mapping changes are treated as true changes."
"Lacks ability to calculate cost of the product."
"The documentation could be improved."
"The performance of Informatica PowerCenter could improve."
"It would be nice to have all tools in one place. CDC needs more effort, as it's only easy to develop if you are familiar with Linux."
Databricks is ranked 1st in Data Science Platforms with 78 reviews while Informatica PowerCenter is ranked 3rd in Data Integration with 78 reviews. Databricks is rated 8.2, while Informatica PowerCenter is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Databricks writes "A nice interface with good features for turning off clusters to save on computing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Informatica PowerCenter writes "Stable, provides good support, and integrating it with other systems is very fast, but its pricing is expensive". Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Dataiku, Dremio, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Azure Stream Analytics, whereas Informatica PowerCenter is most compared with Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Azure Data Factory, SSIS, AWS Glue and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI). See our Databricks vs. Informatica PowerCenter report.
We monitor all Data Science Platforms reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.