We performed a comparison between Azure Data Factory and IBM Cloud Pak for Data 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."It is a complete ETL Solution."
"It is beneficial that the solution is written with Spark as the back end."
"Data Factory itself is great. It's pretty straightforward. You can easily add sources, join and lookup information, etc. The ease of use is pretty good."
"I like its integration with SQL pools, its ability to work with Databricks, its pipelines, and the serverless architecture are the most effective features."
"The solution is okay."
"Data Factory's best features are simplicity and flexibility."
"The overall performance is quite good."
"The trigger scheduling options are decently robust."
"You can model the data there, connect the data models with the business processes and create data lineage processes."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine or ten out of ten."
"DataStage allows me to connect to different data sources."
"Cloud Pak's most valuable features are IBM MQ, IBM App Connect, IBM API Connect, and ISPF."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cloud Pak for Data is the Modeler flows. The ability to develop models using a graphical approach and the capability to connect to various sources, as well as the data virtualization capabilities, allow me to easily access and utilize data that is dispersed across different sources."
"The most valuable features are data virtualization and reporting."
"Its data preparation capabilities are highly valuable."
"What I found most helpful in IBM Cloud Pak for Data is containerization, which means it's easy to shift and leave in terms of moving to other clouds. That's an advantage of IBM Cloud Pak for Data."
"Data Factory could be improved by eliminating the need for a physical data area. We have to extract data using Data Factory, then create a staging database for it with Azure SQL, which is very, very expensive. Another improvement would be lowering the licensing cost."
"User-friendliness and user effectiveness are unquestionably important, and it may be a good option here to improve the user experience. However, I believe that more and more sophisticated monitoring would be beneficial."
"Azure Data Factory uses many resources and has issues with parallel workflows."
"The number of standard adaptors could be extended further."
"Azure Data Factory could benefit from improvements in its monitoring capabilities to provide a more robust feature set. Enhancing the ease of deployment to higher environments within Azure DevOps would be beneficial, as the current process often requires extensive scripting and pipeline development. It is also known for the flexibility of the data flow feature, particularly in supporting more dynamic data-driven architectures. These enhancements would contribute to a more seamless and efficient workflow within GitLab."
"Data Factory could be improved in terms of data transformations by adding more metadata extractions."
"Integration of data lineage would be a nice feature in terms of DevOps integration. It would make implementation for a company much easier. I'm not sure if that's already available or not. However, that would be a great feature to add if it isn't already there."
"I would like to see this time travel feature in Snowflake added to Azure Data Factory."
"Cloud Pak would be improved with integration with cloud service providers like Cloudera."
"The tool depends on the control plane, an OpenShift container platform utilized as an orchestration layer...So, we have communicated this issue to IBM and asked if it is feasible to adapt the solution to work on a Kubernetes platform that we support."
"The solution's user experience is an area that has room for improvement."
"The interface could improve because sometimes it becomes slow. Sometimes there is a delay between clicks when using the software, which can make the development process slow. It can take a few seconds to complete one action, and then a few more seconds to do the next one."
"One challenge I'm facing with IBM Cloud Pak for Data is native features have been decommissioned, such as XML input and output. Too many changes have been made, and my company has around one hundred thousand mappings, so my team has been putting more effort into alternative ways to do things. Another area for improvement in IBM Cloud Pak for Data is that it's more complicated to shift from on-premise to the cloud. Other vendors provide secure agents that easily connect with your existing setup. Still, with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, you have to perform connection migration steps, upgrade to the latest version, etc., which makes it more complicated, especially as my company has XML-based mappings. Still, the XML input and output capabilities of IBM Cloud Pak for Data have been discontinued, so I'd like IBM to bring that back."
"The technical support could be a little better."
"One thing that bugs me is how much infrastructure Cloud Pak requires for the initial deployment. It doesn't allow you to start small. The smallest permitted deployment is too big. It's a huge problem that prevents us from implementing the solution in many scenarios."
"The product must improve its performance."
Azure Data Factory is ranked 1st in Data Integration with 81 reviews while IBM Cloud Pak for Data is ranked 15th in Data Integration with 11 reviews. Azure Data Factory is rated 8.0, while IBM Cloud Pak for Data is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Azure Data Factory writes "The data factory agent is quite good but pricing needs to be more transparent". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Cloud Pak for Data writes "A scalable data analytics and digital transformation tool that provides useful features and integrations". Azure Data Factory is most compared with Informatica PowerCenter, Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Alteryx Designer, Snowflake and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, whereas IBM Cloud Pak for Data is most compared with IBM InfoSphere DataStage, Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Palantir Foundry, Denodo and IBM InfoSphere Information Server. See our Azure Data Factory vs. IBM Cloud Pak for Data report.
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