Informatica Cloud Data Integration vs Talend Open Studio comparison

Informatica Cloud Data Integration is a cloud-native cloud data integration solution that enables users to connect a large number of applications and data sources across on-premises and integrate the data sources at scale on the cloud. The product is built on microservices-driven management and integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and assists organizations to govern costs, increase productivity and collaboration, and simplify their experience. Informatica Cloud Data Integration allows companies to deliver data and analytics to lines of business in a timely manner, build data warehouses on Amazon Redshift, Google Cloud BigQuery, Snowflake, and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, and utilize the required data integration patterns, including elastic processing, extract, load, and transform (ELT), and extract, transform, and load (ETL).

The solution allows users to to build enterprise-scale integration workloads within hours while it improves the productivity of development teams by providing them a codeless, drag-and-drop user interface. Companies can benefit from integration features built for data warehousing and optimized connectors for bulk loads of billions of records. Informatica Cloud Data Integration offers organizations the option of going serverless at scale by allowing them to process data integration jobs from cloud-hosted as well as managed environments. The Spark-based engine allows the solution to handle high-volume data demands and complex data integration tasks.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration Features

Informatica Cloud Data Integration provides its users with various features and tools. Among the key capacities of the product are:

• Advanced Pushdown Optimization: Informatica Cloud Data Integration offers a feature that provides users with the benefits of ELT while maintaining their data flow definitions at a logical or abstract level. This feature allows users to choose a runtime option that complies with the workload as well as send their data processing work to cloud ecosystem pushdown, cloud data warehouse pushdown, Spark serverless processing, or traditional ETL.
  
  
• Connectors for all major data sources: This feature provides out-of-the-box connectivity to a large number of cloud and on-premise systems, data stores, analytics and BI tools, and enterprise and middleware applications.
  
  
• Data transformation capabilities: This feature allows users to process data transformation in real time or batch by using a variety of transformation types, such as cleansing, masking, aggregation, fileting, parsing, and ranking.
  
  
• Spark-based complex data integration: Informatica Cloud Data Integration Elastic allows specialists to use elastic clusters to process their data transformation.
  
  
• Codeless integration: This feature facilitates the creation of simple-to-sophisticated data integration projects with a visual mapping designer that speeds up pre-build transformations for development through a variety of endpoints across cloud and on-premises.
  
  
• Serverless data integration: Users can achieve cloud data integration in a mode called Advanced Serverless, where they can benefit from a fully managed environment with no software, no cloud administration, and no servers or clusters to manage.
  
  
• Taskflow orchestration: This feature allows users to combine batch and real-time integration through a taskflow designer in order to create simple-to-sophisticated orchestrations.
  
  
• Intelligent structure discovery: This feature uses the CLAIRE engine to automatically understand the parsing model for complicated files based on their structure.
  
  
• Change data capture: Utilizing the prebuilt task wizards and Change Data Capture tool, users can automatically pull only the updated or incremental data from source systems to the targets on a frequent basis.
  
  
• Security: The product offers various features which ensure the highest level of data and workload security and comply with various policies.

Informatica Cloud Data Integration Benefits

Informatica Cloud Data Integration brings multiple benefits to its users. These include:

• The product offers optimized connectivity to various systems through custom build-connectors.
  
  
• Users can benefit from improved elasticity and performance by utilizing Spark clusters and auto-tuning.
  
  
• The tool allows developers to focus on business logic by facilitating infrastructure management through serverless deployment features.
  
  
• Informatica Data Cloud Integration provides user flexibility by connecting to any database, cloud data lake, on-premise apps, and data warehouses.
  
  
• Through a zero-coding environment and role-appropriate user experience, the solution is suitable for all types of users.
  
  
• The solution offers consistent experience and unified metadata across all cloud services.
  
  
• Users can leverage enterprise-level performance for integration design with no coding required.
  
  
• Informatica Data Cloud Integration scales as a business grows, providing a high level of adaptability.

Reviews from Real Users

Divya R., a senior consultant at Deloitte, rates Informatica Cloud Data Integration highly because it is a UI-based tool with great scripting.

A data architect at a retailer likes Informatica Cloud Data Integration because of its flexible licensing, good connectors, and timely upgrades and patches.

Talend Open Studio is a free, open source ETL tool for data integration and Big Data. The solution enables you to extract diverse datasets and normalize and transform them into a consistent format which can be loaded into a number of third-party databases and applications.

Talend Open Studio Features

Talend Open Studio has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Automatic identification of data types and potential errors
• tMap module
• Graphical conversion tools
• Charts
• Database SCD Tools
• Business intelligence formats (Jasper, OLAP, SPSS, Splunk)
• ETL and ELT support
• Eclipse-based development tooling
• Versioning
• Large library of connectors
• Data flow orchestration
• File management without scripting
• Data transformations

Talend Open Studio Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing Talend Open Studio. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Reduces the time taken to develop the integration.
• Provides a wide selection of source and target connectors.
• Monitor and manage problematic deployments with ease.
• Allows developers to have the lowest cost of ownership for any solution.
• Improves collaboration between different teams who need access to data.
• Automated data integration process synchronizes the data and eases real time and periodic reporting, which would be time-consuming if done manually.
• Achieve better data quality because data matures and improves over time.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Talend Open Studio solution.

Elio B., Data Integration Specialist/CTO at Asset messages, says, "The solution has a good balance between automated items and the ability for a developer to integrate and extend what he needs. Other competing tools do not offer the same grade of flexibility when you need to go beyond what is provided by the tool. Talend, on the other hand, allows you to expand very easily."

A Practice Head, Analytics at a tech services company mentions, “The data integration aspect of the solution is excellent. The product's data preparation features are very good. There's very useful data stewardship within the product. From a technical standpoint, the solution itself is pretty good. There are very good pre-built connectors in Talend, which is good for many clients or businesses, as, in most cases, companies are dealing with multiple data sources from multiple technologies. That is where a tool like Talend is extremely helpful.”

Prerna T., Senior System Executive at a tech services company, comments, “The best thing I have found with Talend Open Studio is their major support for the lookups. With Salesforce, when we want to relate our child objects to their parent object, we need to create them via IDs. Then the upsert operation, which will allow you to relate a child object to the event, will have an external ID. That is the best thing which keeps it very sorted. I like that.”

An Implementation Specialist, Individual Contributor at a computer software company, states, “I can connect with different databases such as Oracle Database or SQL Server. It allows you to extract the data from one database to another. I can structure the data by filtering and mapping the fields.” He also adds, “It is very user-friendly. You need to know the basics of SQL development or SQL queries, and you can use this tool.”

PeerSpot user Badrakh V., Information System Architect at Astvision, explains, "The most valuable features are the ETL tools."