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IBM API Connect vs Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.9
IBM API Connect enhances profitability and efficiency by reducing development time, improving security, and enabling seamless system integration.
Sentiment score
7.1
Organizations benefit from improved data quality, time savings, and ROI with Informatica Cloud, enhancing processes and security.
Reducing development hours from eighty to four for an API was possible due to reusing existing scripts from DataPower.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
IBM API Connect support is proactive and expert but variable in speed, with regional availability challenges noted by users.
Sentiment score
6.9
Informatica's customer service is effective, praised for responsiveness but criticized for occasional delays and inconsistency.
Support is excellent when it comes to APIC.
Due to the tool's maturity limitations, solutions are not always simple and often require workarounds.
If they are unsure how to resolve an issue, they keep customers informed, providing updates about progress and ensuring communication with the product team to deliver accurate responses.
The response time is pretty good because we have someone in-house, who is an expert from Informatica, in our team who can help us with any sort of queries usually.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
IBM API Connect offers excellent scalability through on-premise and cloud solutions, supporting enterprise-level operations and customization features.
Sentiment score
7.3
Informatica IDMC is highly scalable and adaptable, though optimal design and documentation are crucial for large-scale operations.
With container versions, scaling up or down the gateways deployed into pods is a two to three-minute task for the operations team.
As a SaaS platform, IDMC is quite scalable and provides complete flexibility.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
IBM API Connect is generally stable and reliable, especially in government and banking, despite occasional upgrade issues.
Sentiment score
7.7
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud is generally stable, with newer versions being more reliable and support enhancing consistency.
The runtime engine for the APIC Gateway is still a DataPower component, which has been stable in the industry for about fifteen years.
Stability is crucial because IDMC holds business-critical data, and it needs to be available all the time for business users.
 

Room For Improvement

IBM API Connect needs better integration, automation, monitoring, documentation, and usability, facing issues in setup, costs, and support.
IDMC requires UI improvements, better system connectivity, performance enhancements, cost reduction, AI features, and improved support and observability.
Examples include the lack of connectivity to MQ.
The licenses are too expensive compared to before, which is why customers are now preferring other data metadata management tools like OneTrust, Collibra, and Azure Purview.
I also want to see integration with other Informatica products, such as IICS, to leverage the metadata from EDC.
The tool needs to mature in terms of category-specific attributes or dynamic attributes.
 

Setup Cost

IBM API Connect offers scalable solutions with high costs, suitable for large enterprises, available in SaaS and on-premise versions.
Informatica IDMC's pricing is seen as high, with nuanced licensing, leading to user concerns compared to competitors.
Pricing depends on how many instances run across environments.
IDMC is often described as the 'Ferrari of Master Data Solutions,' implying that while expensive, it is business-critical and, therefore, justified.
The licenses are too expensive compared to before, which is why customers are now preferring other data metadata management tools like OneTrust, Collibra, and Azure Purview.
I think the costs are reasonable for the kinds of features that Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) has.
 

Valuable Features

IBM API Connect excels with strong security, integration, usability, analytics, flexibility, and scalability, enhancing API management and monetization.
Informatica IDMC is a robust cloud platform offering seamless data integration, real-time streaming, and comprehensive data management features.
It offers significant development efficiency, reducing man-hours from eighty to four when creating APIs.
In on-premise, we call it EDC for metadata management, while in cloud-based technologies, it is known as the Metadata Command Center, which serves the same purpose as EDC concerning CDGC.
The platform's ability to pull in data from other platforms without the need for an additional integration tool enhances its appeal.
Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) can connect to pretty much any application, including Oracle Analytics and Power BI, and it works quite seamlessly.
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM API Connect
Ranking in API Management
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) (8th)
Informatica Intelligent Dat...
Ranking in API Management
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
185
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (2nd), Data Quality (1st), Business Process Management (BPM) (11th), Business-to-Business Middleware (5th), Cloud Data Integration (3rd), Data Governance (2nd), Test Data Management (3rd), Cloud Master Data Management (MDM) Solutions (1st), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (2nd), Data Masking (2nd), Metadata Management (1st), Test Data Management Services (3rd), Product Information Management (PIM) (1st), Data Observability (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the API Management category, the mindshare of IBM API Connect is 6.4%, up from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
API Management
 

Featured Reviews

Shanmugasundaram Shanmuganathan - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers basic API orchestration and provides robust security and governance features
While Azure API Management offers configurable scalability, IBM API Connect relies on Kubernetes clusters. This might seem manual and require defining cluster instances upfront, but it's completely customizable and not on-the-fly scaling. It's completely custom-driven, not on-the-fly scaling, which some may consider cumbersome. Overall, I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. Almost all applications we've been exposing lately go through this middleware, so it's used extensively. There are around sixty applications directly using it, but six Kubernetes clusters serve those applications. It's heavily used for integration, including system-to-system integration and product integrations. Our usage has been increasing year-on-year based on our needs.
Raj Sethupathi - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers profiling and address standardization but can be complicated
Informatica Data Quality has its data warehouse, primarily using Oracle and some SQL databases. You need a database to host the data. The cleansed version of the data is stored in the data warehouse. It integrates with PowerCenter and other Informatica tools. The integration details can be complex, but a regional setup is involved in this process. Profiling smaller datasets, such as 10,000-50,000 records, worked fine. However, unexpected issues could arise with larger datasets, such as thousands of records or more, especially with tables containing many columns. Handling tables with fifty or more columns can be challenging, even in Excel. A mismatch in data types could cause the entire system to crash. Continual enhancements are being made to address these issues, which can be unique to specific industries like finance and healthcare.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
19%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Insurance Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM API Connect?
Publishers can easily identify, create, and publish APIs on the developer portal, defining plans, packages, and potentially billing rules.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM API Connect?
Pricing depends on how many instances run across environments. I don't deal with licensing, but compared to other IBM products, the licensing is not significantly higher.
What needs improvement with IBM API Connect?
When comparing API Gateway with DataPower Gateway, several features in DataPower Gateway are absent in the APIC layer. Examples include the lack of connectivity to MQ ( /categories/message-queue-mq...
How does Azure Data Factory compare with Informatica Cloud Data Integration?
Azure Data Factory is a solid product offering many transformation functions; It has pre-load and post-load transformations, allowing users to apply transformations either in code by using Power Q...
Which Informatica product would you choose - PowerCenter or Cloud Data Integration?
Complex transformations can easily be achieved using PowerCenter, which has all the features and tools to establish a real data governance strategy. Additionally, PowerCenter is able to manage huge...
What are the biggest benefits of using Informatica Cloud Data Integration?
When it comes to cloud data integration, this solution can provide you with multiple benefits, including: Overhead reduction by integrating data on any cloud in various ways Effective integration ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
ActiveVOS, Active Endpoints, BPM, Address Verification, Persistent Data Masking, Cloud Test Data Management, PIM, , Enterprise Data Catalog, Data Integration Hub, Cloud Data Integration, Data Quality, Cloud API and App Integration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Heineken, Tine, Finologee, Axis Bank
The Travel Company, Carbonite
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM API Connect vs. Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,162 professionals have used our research since 2012.