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 most valuable aspects of Informatica PowerCenter are the many features, ease of use, and user-friendliness."
"PowerCenter performs well during data transformation and optimization."
"It provides everything I need. Nothing is missing. PowerCenter is a good tool for on-premise databases."
"We use Informatica PowerCenter to transfer the transitional database to and from the data warehouse. This is very efficient as it enables us to quickly find our data reports and the data, so we can build AI models."
"Informatica PowerCenter is a very good ETL tool."
"Technical support is great. It's one of the reasons we really like them. When you compare support from IBM and support from Informatica, Informatica is much better."
"It's very easy to use it to develop mappings and workflows."
"The technical support for Informatica PowerCenter is good."
"The interface is very user-friendly."
"The UI is very user-friendly."
"It's something I needed for bulk imports. I'm not a big fan of it, but I haven't seen anything better."
"The workflow features have been very valuable. You can have automated workflows and all the steps are controlled. The workflow functionality of integration services is excellent."
"This solution is easy to implement, has a wide variety of connectors, has support for Visual Basic, and supports the C language."
"The technical support is very good."
"SSIS integrates well with SQL servers and Microsoft products."
"We can connect with multiple data sources easily using an external connector in SSIS."
"If we could have the option of performance improvement within Informatica, and if it could have more features, that would be ideal."
"Integrated Reporting service should be more smoothly transitioned from view to function to be in sync with the main design."
"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."
"There is some room for improvement in terms of pricing."
"Lacks ability to calculate cost of the product."
"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."
"In terms of performance improvement and tuning, there should be a bit more guidance and documentation."
"The developer tool documentation can be enhanced with a more clear explanation of each utility, accompanied by relevant examples, so that developers are able to create programs with ease."
"SSIS can improve in handling different data sources like Salesforce connectivity, Oracle Cloud's connectivity, etc."
"A change in the metadata source cripples the whole ETL process, requiring each module to be manually reopened."
"It's a legacy tool, that is nearing the end of its useful life."
"When I compare Talend and SSIS, Talend provides more features. With Talend, we can handle a large volume of data. Talend is usually used to treat a large volume of data, which makes it better than SSIS on the data side. Talend also has a very good Talend Management Console to schedule the jobs and do other things. It can also be easily connected to version control tools such as GitHub or SVN. The last time I used SSIS, it was connected through TSS for the Windows Console version. I am not sure it has been improved or not. If it is not improved, Microsoft should improve it. They should change the product to provide another console."
"There are a lot of things that Microsoft could improve in relation to SSIS. One major problem we faced was when attempting to move some Excel files to our SQL Server. The Excel provider has a limitation that prevents importing more than 255 columns from a particular Excel file to the database. This restriction posed a significant issue for us."
"Video training would be a helpful addition."
"I would also like to see full integration with our BI because then our full load of data will be available in our organization. They should incorporate an ATL process."
"I would like to see better technical documentation because many times information is missing."
Informatica PowerCenter is ranked 3rd in Data Integration with 30 reviews while SSIS is ranked 2nd in Data Integration with 33 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 "SSIS 2016 - The good, the bad, and the ugly". Informatica PowerCenter is most compared with Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Azure Data Factory, Databricks, AWS Glue and Informatica PowerExchange, whereas SSIS is most compared with Talend Open Studio, Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), IBM InfoSphere DataStage, 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.