

Pentaho Data Integration and Informatica PowerCenter are two prominent contenders in the data integration space. While Pentaho's free community edition and support affordability make it appealing, Informatica stands out due to its extensive features and high reliability, particularly in complex tasks.
Features: Pentaho Data Integration offers intuitive ease of use, robust support for various data sources, and rapid ETL development, ensuring accessibility across different skill levels. Informatica PowerCenter, on the other hand, excels with extensive transformations, exemplary performance in handling large data volumes, and offers complex integration features ensuring stability and powerful data processing capabilities.
Room for Improvement: Pentaho could improve its admin and monitoring tools, refine error logging, and enhance compatibility with additional programming languages. Challenges include backward compatibility issues and inadequate documentation. Informatica faces criticism for its high costs, complex licensing, and a cumbersome GUI that would benefit from modernized cloud integration support, contrasting with the industry shift towards cloud solutions.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pentaho offers flexible deployment options, including hybrid and cloud environments, with varying levels of customer service enhanced by strong community support. Informatica is mainly centered on-premises but does extend some cloud solutions, providing strong technical support albeit complicated licensing that may alienate smaller businesses.
Pricing and ROI: Pentaho's open-source community edition makes it cost-effective, ideal for smaller enterprises, offering significant ROI by reducing ETL development time. Although Informatica is more expensive, its robust functionality justifies the cost for enterprise-level uses, delivering excellent ROI with comprehensive features that facilitate streamlined operations and meet complex data processing needs.
It also plays a vital role in revenue calculations, net asset valuations, and other key factors that support customer data and investment data pipelines.
I have seen a return on investment; my team was able to stay extremely small even though we had a lot of data integrations with many companies.
I can testify to the return on investment with metrics regarding time saved; we have increased our efficiency by about 20 to 30 percent due to the swift migration processes facilitated by the tool.
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.
24/7 assistance is available for the Enterprise Edition.
take the time to understand our business requirements, offering appropriate recommendations.
Communication with the vendor is challenging
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.
It can be scaled well until you reach a point where you need to perform a lot of operations, and the issue arises when it runs out of memory to handle some data.
Pentaho Data Integration handles larger datasets better.
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics' scalability is commendable, as it allows us to scale up according to our needs.
Informatica PowerCenter is stable and can scale well.
The product is very stable with very few issues encountered in production.
Performance issues arise due to reliance on a flowchart-based mechanism instead of scripts, which can lead to longer execution times.
I find that version 3.1 is the most stable version I have ever used.
It's pretty stable, however, it struggles when dealing with smaller amounts of data.
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.
We should also explore more effective partitioning for parallel processing and fine-tuning database connections to reduce load times and improve ETL speed.
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics can be improved by working with different environments, specifically the possibility to change the variables, meaning I write my variables only once and can change them for different environments such as production or development.
I also lack the option to use programming languages beyond Python and SQL, and a provision to incorporate Scala code in the scripting component would be beneficial.
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.
I use the community version of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics, and I do not need additional costs.
The setup cost was minimal, and the pricing experience was pretty good.
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.
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics has positively impacted my organization because it meant we didn't have to write a lot of custom API back-end processing logic; it did the majority of that heavy lifting for us.
It automates the data workflow, including extraction, cleansing, and loading into warehouses for BI reporting purposes, while also removing duplicates, validating data, and standardizing formats, enabling real-time decision-making.
Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics has positively impacted my organization because it is easier to use, and my knowledge about this work facilitates the translation from the source to my final system.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Informatica PowerCenter | 3.7% |
| Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics | 1.5% |
| Other | 94.8% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 15 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 10 |
| Large Enterprise | 72 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 18 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 18 |
| Large Enterprise | 29 |
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.
Pentaho Data Integration stands as a versatile platform designed to cater to the data integration and analytics needs of organizations, regardless of their size. This powerful solution is the go-to choice for businesses seeking to seamlessly integrate data from diverse sources, including databases, files, and applications. Pentaho Data Integration facilitates the essential tasks of cleaning and transforming data, ensuring it's primed for meaningful analysis. With a wide array of tools for data mining, machine learning, and statistical analysis, Pentaho Data Integration empowers organizations to glean valuable insights from their data. What sets Pentaho Data Integration apart is its maturity and a vibrant community of users and developers, making it a reliable and cost-effective option. Pentaho Data Integration offers a range of features, including a comprehensive ETL toolkit, data cleaning and transformation capabilities, robust data analysis tools, and seamless deployment options for data integration and analytics solutions, making it a go-to solution for organizations seeking to harness the power of their data.
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