We performed a comparison between IBM InfoSphere DataStage and Informatica PowerCenter 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 concept of integration is a valuable feature of the product."
"It works with multiple servers and offers high availability."
"As a data integration platform, it is easy to use. It is quite robust and useful for volumetric analysis when you have huge volumes of data. We have tested it for up to ten million rows, and it is robust enough to process ten million rows internally with its parallel processing. Its error logging mechanism is far simpler and easier to understand than other data integration tools. The newer version of InfoSphere has the data catalog and IDC lineage. They are helpful in the easy traceability of columns and tables."
"The most valuable feature is the data integration for data warehousing."
"The product is a stable and powerful data management solution that can run in parallel mode for enhanced speed."
"The ETL tools are probably the most valuable feature. It has an IBM tool, a friendly UI and it makes things more comfortable."
"The data lineage report can be filtered for reporting. The reports are user-friendly and take less time to find what you need."
"The product is easy to deploy."
"Good interface, reasonable documentation."
"Informatica PowerCenter has been implementing mapping design, data flow, and workflow execution for years."
"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."
"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."
"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 support is valuable. There are also open-source ETL products, which work very well, but there is no support. When we face a production problem, being able to get support is valuable, and it brings efficiency. With an open-source solution, we can't engage anyone to resolve the problem as quickly as possible."
"In the end, you have structured, proper data for use in an integrated BI solution."
"It has helped us monetize."
"The initial setup could be more straightforward."
"Improvements for DataStage could include better integration with modern data sources like cloud solutions and documents, along with enhancing its capability to handle non-structured data."
"There could be more customization options for the product."
"In terms of intermediate storage, we have some challenges, especially with customers who store data in intermediate locations."
"Their web interface is good but the on-prem sites are outdated. The solution could also be improved if they could integrate the data pipeline scheduling part of their interface."
"The template mapping could be easier."
"The initial setup can be complex."
"There are three things that could improve - the cloud, monitoring and cloud integration. It's a solid product but not a modern one and of course it depends what you're looking for."
"Integrated Reporting service should be more smoothly transitioned from view to function to be in sync with the main design."
"There is some room for improvement in terms of pricing."
"Some of the conversions are done inside the product. We use work tables that are created by the engine itself, but the names of the work tables are very long, and they don't have any meaning, which makes it a bit difficult to understand and follow exactly what is happening inside."
"The solution can improve by providing more connectivity by having native ODBC or JDBC connections available. It will be easier and more people could start using it."
"The initial setup is not straightforward. You need expertise to do it."
"If you want to transfer a ZIP file, it is a pain. You need to use Command-Line. Sometimes we just want to transfer a file. It should be easy to move them from A to B."
"If we could have the option of performance improvement within Informatica, and if it could have more features, that would be ideal."
"Informatica PowerCenter could improve by having a single interface because half of the system is still in the legacy interface and many other elements are moved to the developer client. It would be good if there was a single interface for the end user and developers."
IBM InfoSphere DataStage is ranked 7th in Data Integration with 37 reviews while Informatica PowerCenter is ranked 3rd in Data Integration with 78 reviews. IBM InfoSphere DataStage is rated 7.8, while Informatica PowerCenter is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM InfoSphere DataStage writes "User-friendly with a lot of functions for transmission rules, but has slow performance and not suitable for a huge volume of data". 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". IBM InfoSphere DataStage is most compared with SSIS, IBM Cloud Pak for Data, Azure Data Factory, Talend Open Studio and IBM InfoSphere Information Server, whereas Informatica PowerCenter is most compared with Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Azure Data Factory, SSIS, Databricks and SAP Data Services. See our IBM InfoSphere DataStage vs. Informatica PowerCenter report.
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My experience with these products is telling me that:
- Informatica is much more flexible, it has more points, where different types of codding and tuning are available. If the landscape is heterogeneous and complex - it’s the right choice. On the other hand, it works more slowly.
- IBM DS is very strong in code efficiency and flows parallelism. If the landscape is IBM-oriented or not so complex, but data volumes are huge - it’s the right choice. On the other hand, coding and tuning abilities are more ascetic.
- Informatica needs dedicated admin in the project team, IBM DS - does not.
- Informatica has an evolving cloud version, IBM DS hasn’t yet.
- Informatica is not proper working with Hadoop, IBM DS is.
The pricing of both is more or less equal.