We performed a comparison between Informatica PowerCenter, SAP Data Hub, and SnapLogic based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Oracle and others in Data Integration."What I like most about Informatica PowerCenter is that it's the best tool in the market for data integration. Currently, I work in L'Oréal, where a new system from SAP is used. Informatica PowerCenter integration with SAP is very, very fast and very, very simple, so you have the server flow from SAP, and through Informatica PowerCenter, you can ingest the data and make that data available for the business more quickly."
"It is an excellent ETL tool."
"It has a Data Catalog that uses the Model repository."
"We can scale the product."
"Easy, scalable, robust platform to integrate heterogeneous source platform's data into the unified data warehouse."
"We have found the PowerCenter and B2B data transformation most valuable."
"To me, what's most valuable in Informatica PowerCenter is the flexibility in building the integration pipeline. Usually, you need to have a platform to be able to integrate with different technologies, including legacy data such as the mainframe. The platform should also be rich enough to transform the data per your business requirement, with no restrictions. Rich integration and rich transformation capabilities are the two key capabilities in Informatica PowerCenter. The solution also offers ease of use. Another valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the drag-and-drop integration because it's GUI-based, similar to IBM and Oracle."
"It provides monitoring and we can therefore be aware of what is happening when we are handling jobs."
"SAP is one of the most seamless ERPs that have integrated SAP archiving within Excel. I have not seen this with any other database."
"The most valuable feature is the S/4HANA 1909 On-Premise"
"Its connection to on-premise products is the most valuable. We mostly use the on-premise connection, which is seamless. This is what we prefer in this solution over other solutions. We are using it the most for the orchestration where the data is coming from different categories. Its other features are very much similar to what they are giving us in open source. Their push-down approach is the most advantageous, where they push most of the processing on to the same data source. This means that they have a serverless kind of thing, and they don't process the data inside a product such as Data Hub. They process the data from where the data is coming out. If it is coming from HANA, to capture the data or process it for analytics, orchestration, or management, they go to the HANA database and give it out. They don't process it on Data Hub. This push-down approach increases the processing speed a little bit because the data is processed where it is sitting. That's the best part and an advantage. I have used another product where they used to capture the data first and then they used to process it and give it. In Data Hub, it is in reverse. They process it first and give it, and then they put their own manipulations. They lead in terms of business functions. No other solution has business functions already implemented to perform business analysis. They have a lot of prebuilt business functions for machine learning and orchestration, which we can use directly to get an analysis out from the existing data. Most of the data is sitting as enterprise data there. That's a major advantage that they have."
"They are very good at building out new aspects according to customer requirements."
"An important tool for building prototypes and MVPs than can seamlessly turn into production jobs"
"You can use other languages, such as Python, and easily connect to other systems."
"SnapLogic is an IPA tool that leverages a low code environment to connect to multiple sources, extract data, and store it in Azure data lake."
"It's more developer-friendly, and development can be done at a faster phase."
"The API architecture makes it easy for orchestration."
"What I found most valuable in SnapLogic is the ETL feature, particularly the Transform Snap Pack, for example, any kind of reading or writing on Transform Snaps. Other than that, all the third-party connectivity tools such as the SAP Snap Pack, Salesforce Snap Pack, Workday Snap Pack, even the ServiceNow Snap Pack, I find all those are pretty useful in SnapLogic."
"SnapLogic is a great platform for establishing integrations among various systems or patterns by using any kind of interface. If something is not supported by predefined snaps – snaps are connectors in SnapLogic – you can create them (custom snaps) or write a script."
"PowerCenter could integrate better with cloud applications. We had to do a lot of configuration work using API integrations to connect with cloud applications. Informatica Cloud Data Integration has a generic connector that you can use directly, so it's much easier."
"It should be more cloud-centric than on-prem-centric."
"The real-time database connectivity when getting the real-time data using the VPN is an area that needs improvement."
"In terms of performance improvement and tuning, there should be a bit more guidance and documentation."
"The initial setup is not straightforward. You need expertise to do it."
"What I didn't like about it is that the platform itself is not great at distributed processing. When you need high parallel processing, it has some inherent issues. We had to use Java transformation, and it did not go very well. I have heard that it is going to the cloud, but we haven't tried that."
"While Informatica is great for data-integration, it does not have any analytics features. Thus, organizations have to always look for another product for their BI needs."
"Integration with Artificial Intelligence would benefit this solution."
"Nowadays there are some inconsistencies in data bases, however, they upgrade and release the versions to market."
"The company has everything offshore."
"In 2018, connecting it to outside sources, such as IoT products or IoT-enabled big data Hadoop, was a little complex. It was not smooth at the beginning. It was unstable. It took a lot of time for the initial data load. Sometimes, the connection broke, and we had to restart the process, which was a major issue, but they might have improved it now. It is very smooth with SAP HANA on-premise system, SAP Cloud Platform, and SAP Analytics Cloud. It could be because these are their own products, and they know how to integrate them. With Hadoop, they might have used open-source technologies, and that's why it was breaking at that time. They are providing less embedded integration because they want us to use their other products. For example, they don't want to go and remove SAP Analytics Cloud and put everything in Data Hub. They want us to use SAP Analytics Cloud somewhere else and not inside the Data Hub. On the integration part, it lacks real-time analytics, and it is slow. They should embed the SAP Analytics Cloud inside Data Hub or support some kind of analysis. They do provide some analysis, but it is not extensive. They are moreover open source. So, we need a lot of developers or data scientists to go in and implement Python algorithms. It would be better if they can provide their own existing algorithms and give some connections and drop-down menus to go and just configure those. It will make things really quick by increasing the embedded integrations. It will also improve the process efficiency and processing power. Its performance needs improvement. It is a little slow. It is not the best in the market, and there are other products that are much better than this. In terms of technology and performance, it is a little slow as compared to Microsoft and other data orchestration products. I haven't used other products, but I have read about those products, their settings, and the milliseconds that they do. In Azure Purview, they say that they can copy, manage, or transform the data within milliseconds. They say that they can transform 100 gigabytes of data within three to five seconds, which is something SAP cannot do. It generally takes a lot of time to process that much amount of data. However, I have never tested out Azure."
"One area for improvement in SnapLogic is the transparency in the flow of data. It needs to have more transparency. Right now, users only have a preview option at the end of any job flow, so at the end of any Snap Pack, there is a data preview option that lets you review the data and see how it's moving. What would make the solution better is more debugging and more access to change data from the preview panel or more functionality in terms of the preview option."
"They should expand in terms of features for SaaS-based market requirements in different sectors."
"I don't think the support has better knowledge about technologies and tool support. There were lots of times when we had an issue, and it took me quite a long time to explain the problem. I feel like some of the support staff don't know their product well."
"SnapLogic sits somewhere in the middle. It doesn’t offer enough easy canned integrations for its users like some of the easier to use integration apps."
"There is room for improvement with APM management and how task execution looks."
"The dashboards regarding scheduled tasks need further improvement."
"We'd like zero downtime in the future."
"The support is the most important improvement they could make."
