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."IBM is stable and accurate to monitor. It's easy to understand to monitor the data lineage from source to target."
"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 product is easy to deploy."
"Finding logs is very easy on the solution."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ability to incorporate very complex business rules in Data Stage."
"The concept of integration is a valuable feature of the product."
"The most valuable feature is the data integration for data warehousing."
"The most valuable features are the dynamic reading of the file metadata profile, and the ability to define business rules that are used to verify and validate the uploaded files."
"I like the completeness of the way I can build ETL workflows."
"It has helped us monetize."
"Ease and speed of building integrations, especially integrations between different applications, such as our Hospital Information System."
"The interface is very clean and clear."
"The ability to scale through partitions helped us to improve the performance."
"Can manage a huge quantity of data and provide reliability."
"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."
"The interface needs work to be more user-friendly."
"The solution can be a bit more user-friendly, similar to Informatica."
"The template mapping could be easier."
"The troubleshooting guide is very bad."
"It takes a lot of time to actually trigger your job and then go into the logs and other stuff. So all of this is really time-consuming."
"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."
"The graphical user interface (GUI) feels a lot like the interfaces from the 1980s."
"It doesn't have any big data connections. It would be good to have them because most of the systems are moving towards big data. There should also be a user-friendly way to interact with the cloud. Its loading process is very slow. It takes a lot of time for around 5 or 6 million records, and we are not able to provide real-time data to the vendors due to this delay. Its performance needs to be improved. It is also like a legacy system. It is not updated much. In higher versions, they only do small changes. We would like to have new features and new technologies."
"Lacks ability to calculate cost of the product."
"The documentation could be improved."
"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."
"Requires an established data center because there is no option for software as a service."
"Unstructured data handling is an important area with a shortcoming that needs improvement in the solution."
"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."
"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."
"We had to take on a large volume of data from the legacy Sybase system. This was taking a very long time, i.e., more than a day. We were trying to improve it with partitions to gpload, but we were told that we can't go more than four partitions."
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.