Informatica PowerCenter and AWS Glue compete in the data integration tools category. AWS Glue has the upper hand for organizations deeply integrated with AWS infrastructure due to its seamless integration with other AWS services and pricing flexibility.
Features: Informatica PowerCenter is known for its advanced data governance, extensive data transformation options, and legacy system integration capabilities, making it suitable for enterprises with complex data environments. It effectively integrates data in multiple formats and handles large volumes with robust transformations to develop complex workflows. AWS Glue stands out for its modern approach with serverless architecture, offering ease of integration with other AWS services, automation capabilities, and an intuitive user interface.
Room for Improvement: Informatica PowerCenter is challenged by high costs, complicated installation, and limited cloud readiness. Improvements are also needed in the GUI, connectivity, and cloud service integration. AWS Glue can become costly at scale and struggles with non-Amazon environments. Its learning curve and issues with detailed error handling and enhanced transformation features also present barriers. AWS Glue could improve real-time capabilities, monitoring, and programming language support.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Informatica PowerCenter is primarily deployed on-premises and in private clouds, catering to enterprise-level environments. Its customer service receives positive feedback for problem-solving. AWS Glue is used in public and hybrid cloud environments, offering easy deployment via its serverless architecture for AWS users. However, AWS Glue's customer support often receives lower ratings, suggesting a need for improvement.
Pricing and ROI: Informatica PowerCenter has a high licensing cost, making it best suited for large enterprises, but it provides substantial ROI through extensive data management capabilities. AWS Glue's flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model is cost-effective for smaller organizations, though costs can rise as usage scales. Its pricing model allows for ease in budgeting due to usage dependency, with both products providing value in their respective contexts.
I advocate using Glue in such cases.
It also plays a vital role in revenue calculations, net asset valuations, and other key factors that support customer data and investment data pipelines.
Upgrades occur every four months, and new developments coincide with version updates.
For complex Glue-related problems such as job failures or permission issues, their documentation is good, but having direct access to support helps cut down troubleshooting time significantly.
I like the technical support provided by Informatica.
I have occasionally needed to communicate with the technical support of Informatica PowerCenter, especially when raising cases for complex mappings and performance optimization to identify bottlenecks in transformations.
It is beneficial to upgrade jobs, and we conduct extensive testing in development before migrating to production.
It can easily handle data from one terabyte to 100 terabytes or more, scaling nicely with larger datasets.
In the cloud, scaling up and down becomes easy when working with cloud providers.
For scalability, I would rate Informatica PowerCenter between eight to nine.
AWS Glue is highly stable, and I would rate its stability as nine.
Informatica PowerCenter is stable and can scale well.
The product is very stable with very few issues encountered in production.
Migrating jobs from version 3.0 to 4.0 can present compatibility issues.
With AWS, I gather data from multiple sources, clean it up, normalize it, de-duplicate it, and make it presentable.
A more user-friendly and simpler process would help speed up the deployment process.
With Informatica PowerCenter, I am looking for an AI interface that looks at the underlying data model of the databases and the metadata of the tables, allowing the developer to provide instructions on what data sources to connect to and how to apply or create Transformations.
Utilizing more stored procedures from Oracle databases in an easy way would significantly boost performance.
Informatica Cloud and its support becomes quite expensive for the organization compared to peers such as SnapLogic or Netezza, which offer lower pricing.
Costing depends on resource usage, and cost optimization may involve redesigning jobs for flexibility.
AWS charges based on runtime, which can be quite pricey.
The smallest cost for a project is around €700, while the largest can reach up to €7,000 based on the scale of the usage.
I find that the pricing and licensing for Informatica PowerCenter align with its quality.
The price of Informatica PowerCenter is high, especially for small and medium-sized businesses.
For ETL, I feel the performance is excellent. If I create jobs in a standard way, the performance is great, and maintenance is also seamless.
AWS Glue's most valuable features include its transformation capabilities, which provide data quality and shape for processing in ML or AI models.
AWS Glue has reduced efforts by 60%, which is the main benefit.
The system supports real-time integration, which is essential for many of my tasks.
The functions in Informatica PowerCenter that I have found most valuable are the way it manages the volume of data, the push down optimization, and the performance aspects of it, mostly related to parallelism techniques.
The most valuable features of Informatica PowerCenter that I have found so far include transformations, the ease of connectivity with different source systems, and the parameter files.
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 11 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 6 |
| Large Enterprise | 32 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 15 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 10 |
| Large Enterprise | 72 |
AWS Glue is a serverless cloud data integration tool that facilitates the discovery, preparation, movement, and integration of data from multiple sources for machine learning (ML), analytics, and application development. The solution includes additional productivity and data ops tooling for running jobs, implementing business workflows, and authoring.
AWS Glue allows users to connect to more than 70 diverse data sources and manage data in a centralized data catalog. The solution facilitates visual creation, running, and monitoring of extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to load data into users' data lakes. This Amazon product seamlessly integrates with other native applications of the brand and allows users to search and query cataloged data using Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.
The solution also utilizes application programming interface (API) operations to transform users' data, create runtime logs, store job logic, and create notifications for monitoring job runs. The console of AWS Glue connects all of these services into a managed application, facilitating the monitoring and operational processes. The solution also performs provisioning and management of the resources required to run users' workloads in order to minimize manual work time for organizations.
AWS Glue Features
AWS Glue groups its features into four categories - discover, prepare, integrate, and transform. Within those groups are the following features:
AWS Glue Benefits
AWS Glue offers a wide range of benefits for its users. These benefits include:
Reviews from Real Users
Mustapha A., a cloud data engineer at Jems Groupe, likes AWS Glue because it is a product that is great for serverless data transformations.
Liana I., CEO at Quark Technologies SRL, describes AWS Glue as a highly scalable, reliable, and beneficial pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Informatica PowerCenter is a data integration and data visualization tool. The solution works as an enterprise data integration platform that helps organizations access, transform, and integrate data from various systems. The product is designed to support companies in the full cycle of a project, from its initial rollout to critical deployments. Informatica PowerCenter allows developers and analysts to collaborate while accelerating the work process to deploy projects within days instead of months.
The Advanced edition of the product provides an additional real-time engine which allows companies to have always-on enterprise data integration. This ensures seamless collaboration and increment of data lineage visibility and impacts analysis.
The Premium edition of the solution offers an early warning system that detects unexpected behaviors or incorrect utilization of resources in the workflows and alerts companies in the case that these occur. This version of the product also offers automatic data validation, which ensures data accuracy and reduces testing time and expenditure of resources for by up to 90%.
Informatica PowerCenter Features
The product provides users with various features which allow them to execute data integration initiatives such as analytics, data warehousing, data governance, consolidation, and application migration. The features of the solution include:
Informatica PowerCenter Benefits
The benefits of using Informatica PowerCenter include:
Reviews from Real Users
Yahya T., a developer and architect at L'Oreal, says the product is stable, provides good support, and integrating it with other systems is very fast.
Mohamed E., a senior manager for Data management and data governance at a tech company, says PowerCenter is stable, mature, and offers flexibility in building the pipeline and has a drag-and-drop mode because it's GUI-based; technical support is brilliant.
We monitor all Cloud Data Integration reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
