I've used a variety of Informatica solutions. 

We work with various solution vendors. For example, we use IBM Confluent for messaging and streaming, Tibco for application and data integration, etc.

I would compare PowerExchange to Oracle GoldenGate for real-time integration. GoldenGate consumes more resources from CPU and memory, but it's more stable, and the performance benchmark is higher.

The investment is bigger than Informatica. Informatica is moving to the cloud, so the investment required for real-time stuff and on-prem integration is not like before. I always compare to GoldenGate when choosing a technical solution. They're doing quite well in real-time integration.

I have also used Informatica PowerCenter and the main difference is that PowerExchange is mainly cloud-hosted. People can access it from anywhere.

We did not use a similar solution prior to this one.

I have used a number of similar solutions including other Informatica products such as Enterprise Data Catalog and PowerCenter.