We performed a comparison between Informatica PowerCenter and StreamSets based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Integration solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable aspects of Informatica PowerCenter are the many features, ease of use, and user-friendliness."
"The most complex task, in this case, was to read and transform BLOB data, and Java transformation in Informatica Power Center was a great solution."
"The most valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is data transformation and user-friendliness."
"The setup is very simple."
"The number of docs has been reduced drastically, which is very good."
"It is very comprehensive in terms of connector and transformation capabilities from both a source and target perspective."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring tools and the reporting manager."
"If the systems get migrated or upgraded, the amount of resources required are very minimal. We can change the connections and establish a new connection. It's very helpful."
"The most valuable feature is the pipelines because they enable us to pull in and push out data from different sources and to manipulate and clean things up within them."
"StreamSets’ data drift resilience has reduced the time it takes us to fix data drift breakages. For example, in our previous Hadoop scenario, when we were creating the Sqoop-based processes to move data from source to destinations, we were getting the job done. That took approximately an hour to an hour and a half when we did it with Hadoop. However, with the StreamSets, since it works on a data collector-based mechanism, it completes the same process in 15 minutes of time. Therefore, it has saved us around 45 minutes per data pipeline or table that we migrate. Thus, it reduced the data transfer, including the drift part, by 45 minutes."
"What I love the most is that StreamSets is very light. It's a containerized application. It's easy to use with Docker. If you are a large organization, it's very easy to use Kubernetes."
"One of the things I like is the data pipelines. They have a very good design. Implementing pipelines is very straightforward. It doesn't require any technical skill."
"The UI is user-friendly, it doesn't require any technical know-how and we can navigate to social media or use it more easily."
"StreamSets data drift feature gives us an alert upfront so we know that the data can be ingested. Whatever the schema or data type changes, it lands automatically into the data lake without any intervention from us, but then that information is crucial to fix for downstream pipelines, which process the data into models, like Tableau and Power BI models. This is actually very useful for us. We are already seeing benefits. Our pipelines used to break when there were data drift changes, then we needed to spend about a week fixing it. Right now, we are saving one to two weeks. Though, it depends on the complexity of the pipeline, we are definitely seeing a lot of time being saved."
"Also, the intuitive canvas for designing all the streams in the pipeline, along with the simplicity of the entire product are very big pluses for me. The software is very simple and straightforward. That is something that is needed right now."
"StreamSets Transformer is a good feature because it helps you when you are developing applications and when you don't want to write a lot of code. That is the best feature overall."
"Informatica are very rigid when it comes to cloud migrations which discourages customers in moving their solution to the cloud."
"It would be better if I could do all the work within a single window. If I'm working on any mapping and if I have to switch to sessions, I have to open a new window altogether. If I have to get into workflows, I have to open a new window. It was also very expensive. In the next release, I would like it to be more user-friendly."
"The UI is a little outdated."
"We need another tool for monitoring. It would be easier if all the features were consolidated into one tool."
"Informatica PowerCenter could improve on the documentation for the implementation. The documents provided are not very good for a new user."
"Areas for improvement in Informatica PowerCenter include scalability and high availability or the clustering configuration because that's still very basic. The elasticity or scaling of the platform needs a lot of improvement. For example, when it comes to DR handling or building an active-active or active-passive cluster, Informatica PowerCenter is still not that powerful. Automation also needs improvement in the solution. Improving automation leads to some improvement in the stability of Informatica PowerCenter and other aspects related to it. What I'd like to see in the next release of Informatica PowerCenter is real-time capability because the solution is mainly for patches, and to have real-time integration, you need to count on some additional components from Informatica. I would expect more integration and a complete platform in terms of real-time capability or patching with minimal interventions or minimal components to be aligned together."
"As a connector to big data, it is not well developed. We've had problems connecting Informatica with Hadoop. The functionality to connect Informatica with Hadoop, for me it's not good."
"This solution needs the functionality to do batch processing of data. It also lacks connectivity to NoSQL, unstructured data sources."
"We've seen a couple of cases where it appears to have a memory leak or a similar problem."
"Sometimes, when we have large amounts of data that is very efficiently stored in Hadoop or Kafka, it is not very efficient to run it through StreamSets, due to the lack of efficiency or the resources that StreamSets is using."
"The software is very good overall. Areas for improvement are the error logging and the version history. I would like to see better, more detailed error logging information."
"StreamSet works great for batch processing but we are looking for something that is more real-time. We need latency in numbers below milliseconds."
"The design experience is the bane of our existence because their documentation is not the best. Even when they update their software, they don't publish the best information on how to update and change your pipeline configuration to make it conform to current best practices. We don't pay for the added support. We use the "freeware version." The user community, as well as the documentation they provide for the standard user, are difficult, at best."
"The execution engine could be improved. When I was at their session, they were using some obscure platform to run. There is a controller, which controls what happens on that, but you should be able to easily do this at any of the cloud services, such as Google Cloud. You shouldn't have any issues in terms of how to run it with their online development platform or design platform, basically their execution engine. There are issues with that."
"We often faced problems, especially with SAP ERP. We struggled because many columns weren't integers or primary keys, which StreamSets couldn't handle. We had to restructure our data tables, which was painful. Also, pipeline failures were common, and data drifting wasn't addressed, which made things worse. Licensing was another issue we encountered."
"Using ETL pipelines is a bit complicated and requires some technical aid."
Informatica PowerCenter is ranked 3rd in Data Integration with 78 reviews while StreamSets is ranked 8th in Data Integration with 24 reviews. Informatica PowerCenter is rated 8.0, while StreamSets is rated 8.4. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StreamSets writes "We no longer need to hire highly skilled data engineers to create and monitor data pipelines". Informatica PowerCenter is most compared with Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Azure Data Factory, SSIS and Databricks, whereas StreamSets is most compared with Fivetran, Azure Data Factory, SSIS, IBM InfoSphere DataStage and webMethods.io Integration. See our Informatica PowerCenter vs. StreamSets report.
See our list of best Data Integration vendors.
We monitor all Data Integration 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.