We performed a comparison between Informatica Powercenter and SSIS based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Informatica PowerCenter is a more advanced option if you can afford the higher price. However, SSIS scored better in terms of ease of deployment and service and support.
"The reliability of the product and the way of orchestration of different services is valuable to us."
"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."
"It provides everything I need. Nothing is missing. PowerCenter is a good tool for on-premise databases."
"Good interface, reasonable documentation."
"I like the automated scheduling feature."
"Informatica PowerCenter has good user feedback. The developers can easily make mappings in the solution."
"Can manage a huge quantity of data and provide reliability."
"It has helped us monetize."
"SSIS integrates well with SQL servers and Microsoft products."
"It's already very user-friendly and has a good dashboard."
"The most valuable feature of SSIS is that you can take data from other servers which are not MS SQL Server or Oracle."
"The performance and stability are good."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that it is simple to use and it offers a flexible custom script task."
"The simplicity of the solution is great. The solution also offers excellent integration."
"SSIS' best feature is SFTP connectivity."
"The most valuables features are the relatively short learning curve, and the automation capabilities provided through the BIML add-in for SSDT."
"They should release new versions for the solution's on-premises setup."
"The solution could have better documentation on basic steps or blocks that specify what to do."
"The only problem with this product is the level of complexity with the number of levels of transformation that you have to go through."
"This product is going to decommission in the next couple of years."
"Informatica PowerCenter could improve on the documentation for the implementation. The documents provided are not very good for a new user."
"It should be more cloud-centric than on-prem-centric."
"There is some room for improvement in terms of pricing."
"PowerCenter could be improved by having more big data components. Normally, we prefer Informatica as a relational database, but nowadays, companies are trying to understand and use big data components. I think it would be useful if we had more chances to create a hub ecosystem because customers try to use some data integration tasks by SQL, Spark and Spark codes, and Scala, but at the end of the day, the company will understand that we need to trace all the steps. An ETL tool is a must for that company, if we're talking about the regulated industries like finance, telcos, etc. If Informatica's biggest ecosystems feature were okay, I would prefer to use it."
"We've had issues in terms of the amount of data that is transferred when we are scheduling."
"There were some issues when we tried to connect it to data storage. It was a connection issue."
"It hangs a lot of the time."
"SSIS is stable, but extensive ETL data processing can have some performance issues."
"At one point, we did have to purchase an add-on."
"SSIS sometimes hangs, and there are some problems with servers going down after they've been patched."
"Options for scaling could be improved."
"I would like to see more standard components out of the box, such as SFTP, and Data Compression components."
Informatica PowerCenter is ranked 3rd in Data Integration with 78 reviews while SSIS is ranked 2nd in Data Integration with 69 reviews. Informatica PowerCenter is rated 8.0, while SSIS is rated 7.6. 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 SSIS writes "Maintaining the solution and contacting its support team is easy". Informatica PowerCenter is most compared with Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Azure Data Factory, Databricks, AWS Glue and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), whereas SSIS is most compared with Talend Open Studio, IBM InfoSphere DataStage, Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), AWS Glue and Azure Data Factory. See our Informatica PowerCenter vs. SSIS report.
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Curious why you would compare these 2 tools and why you wouldn't be looking for a PaaS solution?
SSIS is free verses Informatica is the opposite. But there are no plans to fully embrace SSIS within Azure. They have moved to ADF and Synapse pipelines.
That said there is IR (Integration Runtime) so you can run SSIS in Azure but it's limited in terms of SSIS add-ons. Clearly, the future for Microsoft is Azure and Synapse so don't count on SSIS staying around for many more years.
In fact, the BiXpress add-on has been deprecated by its new owner. And I would NOT recommend using SSIS without BiXpress as its built-in logging and error control is awful.
I'm looking at us migrating from SSIS to ADF over the next few years.
SSIS PowerPack is a group of drag and drop connectors for Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services, commonly called SSIS. The collection helps organizations boost productivity with code-free components and connect cloud and on-premises data sources. We find it very useful for connecting traditional data sources, big data, and NoSQL.
We like that it can carry out simple and complex transformations. It is easy to use and helps us connect with multiple systems and web services. It makes it really easy for developers to develop production SSIS packages. It helps us to pull data because it is DBA-friendly.
However, the filtering of the tasks is a bit difficult, and the error messages can be confusing and hard to resolve.
That’s why, when evaluating both solutions, we ultimately decided to go with Informatica PowerCenter. This metadata-driven integration tool is easy to use and effective even when creating complex mapping. It is easy to monitor jobs, create workflows, and detect bugs. It is well suited for handling a low volume of records, therefore maintaining a real-time operation at an affordable cost.
Another advantage is that it works with ETL-type data integration, connecting to almost all types of database systems. It has great support and documentation, too. Informatica PowerCenter can address different data quality issues, such as data masking and virtualization. It has supporting tools for big data as well. It is critical to ensure we can feed on multiple data streams and transform them into usable data in the data warehouse.
There are a few downsides, though. There aren’t many scheduling options, and debugging the workflows is kind of hard.
Conclusions:
Overall, SSIS is a very good group of tools. For organizations used to working with MS products, it provides easy integration and connections between databases. Since we work with a small number of records, the Informatica PowerCenter works better for us.