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IBM App Connect vs Qlik Compose comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

IBM App Connect
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Integration (18th)
Qlik Compose
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (52nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Nirav Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior QA Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Cloud workflows have accelerated integrations and now demand better debugging and DevOps support
IBM App Connect provides many features, but there are several areas for improvement. Better debugging and observability would help us track any single transaction end-to-end across steps and connectors. Features such as a step-by-step line view and one-click download for flow execution would be beneficial. Improved CI/CD pipeline and GitOps experience would be valuable. The team wants flows as code and predictable promotion across development, test, and production environments. Stronger native Git integration, export-import functionalities, and first-class pipeline templates like Jenkins, GitHub, and Azure DevOps would be beneficial. More cloud-native, lightweight runtime options would be very helpful. Connector reliability and consistency need improvement because some connectors feel more mature than others, and version changes can break mapping. Pricing and licensing clarity is important because the licensing is complex and can slow down adoption and planning. Some improvement areas include handling very complex structures that the platform currently does not support. Improvements on the DevOps side, particularly providing templates, would be beneficial. The platform is somewhat expensive and hard to predict in terms of cost. Debugging features need to be provided. For CI/CD, the flows are not truly accurate and need improvement.
SA
Director - Metrics & Analytics at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Efficient data warehouse automation with robust features, but may require enhancements in user-friendly self-service options and pricing flexibility for broader corporate appeal
It could enhance its capabilities in the realm of self-service options as currently, it is more suited for individuals with technical proficiency who can create pages using it. When it comes to end users who may lack technical expertise, they are limited to toggling between existing developments. To empower end users to make critical changes without relying heavily on technical expertise, it would be beneficial to introduce more user-friendly features for development and modification. If it could incorporate correlation analysis capabilities into its platform, especially in a user-friendly manner, it would greatly enhance the tool's overall utility and make it an even more outstanding solution. There is a room for improvement regarding stability.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's stable to use, connect with the cloud, and to deploy."
"App Connect's best feature is that it can be deployed in a container."
"I would say that the most valuable feature is the array of connectors and integration tools."
"It's a powerful application for collaboration. It has many features for customization and integration."
"The most valuable feature for me is the availability of the adapters, which are already made out of the box."
"The beauty of IBM App Connect is that it provides end-to-end middleware."
"The transformation capabilities in IBM App Connect are particularly beneficial."
"One of the most beneficial features is the ability to handle multiple communication technologies, like integrating Kafka flows, which is helpful as other teams heavily use it. Regarding error handling, I initially wrote most of the handling myself. While built-in features for error handling are built-in, it largely depends on the developer. We use a custom solution that catches all exceptions, logs them in a database, and replays them as needed. It has been effective for us for over twenty years."
"One of the most valuable features was the ability to integrate multiple source systems that mainly used structured IDBMS versions."
"Qlik Compose is good enough. It is user-friendly and intuitive."
"It is a scalable solution."
"As long as you pick the solution that best fits with your requirements, you won't find that performance is a problem. It's good."
"The most valuable is its excellence as a graphical data representation tool and the versatility it offers, especially with drill-down capabilities."
"I have found it to be a very good, stable, and strong product."
"It's a stable solution."
"One of the most valuable features of this tool is its automation capabilities, allowing us to design the warehouse in an automated manner. Additionally, we can generate Data Lifecycle Policies (DLP) reports and efficiently implement updates and best practices based on proven design patterns."
 

Cons

"It is not easy to deploy. It requires someone with a high level of knowledge in the solution to deploy it, not just anyone can do it."
"Because we have the Hypervisor Edition, we have run into scalability issues."
"IBM App Connect is scalable. From the administration side, they need to improve the RBAC model, as well as the clustering of this product. It will be good if we can start up the cluster, via IBM Connect Console. Some other products like MuleSoft, are providing this type of administration. MuleSoft is easy to use and user friendly."
"IBM needs to enhance and have a stronger offering for the event streaming part because this is the future needed for the containerization and the new integration requirement."
"The installation of containers could be simplified, as it currently requires a senior-level installer."
"If I call within the next two hours, someone should be there at least on a call to support me."
"I've been using IBM App Connect for about twenty-five years, and while I like it, there are some areas for improvement. The trace policy is ridiculous, and the biggest issue is the cost—it's expensive. People would use it much more if the price point weren't so high."
"When we do a version upgrade of the system, the platform is kind of complicated."
"There should be proper documentation available for the implementation process."
"I'd like to have access to more developer training materials."
"My issues with the solution's stability are owing to the fact that it has certain bugs causing issues in some functionalities that should be working."
"It could enhance its capabilities in the realm of self-service options as currently, it is more suited for individuals with technical proficiency who can create pages using it."
"When processing data from certain tables with a large volume of data, we encounter significant delays. For instance, when dealing with around one million records, it typically takes three to four hours. To address this, I aim to implement performance improvements across all tables, ensuring swift processing similar to those that are currently complete within seconds. The performance issue primarily arises when we analyze the inserts and updates from the source, subsequently dropping the table. While new insertions are handled promptly, updates are processed slowly, leading to performance issues. Despite consulting our Qlik vendors, they were unable to pinpoint the exact cause of this occurrence. Consequently, I am seeking ways to optimize performance within Qlik Compose, specifically concerning updates."
"There is some scope for improvement around the documentation, and a better UI would definitely help."
"The solution has room for improvement in the ETL. They have an ETL, but when it comes to the monitoring portion, Qlik Compose doesn't provide a feature for monitoring."
"I believe that visual data flow management and the transformation function should be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing cost for IBM App Connect is very high."
"App Connect is not cheap."
"The solution's pricing isn't cheap, but you can get good discounts based on your competitive deal."
"It is very expensive if we want to scale."
"IBM App Connect's pricing is high compared to other products."
"The price could be better."
"The cost depends upon the consumer."
"Initially, App Connect was quite expensive because the cost was based on the number of processors we used. However, it's now based on containers, which means we can be more specific about our consumption and get a better price."
"While they outperform Tableau, there's room for improvement in Qlik's pricing structures, especially for corporate clients like us."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive, I rate the solution a six."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise21
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM App Connect?
Configuration time varies by implementation. For insurance companies with simple JDBC connections, the process is straightforward. However, companies requiring multiple configurations for ODBC, JDB...
What is your primary use case for IBM App Connect?
IBM App Connect serves as our integration platform, allowing us to connect application systems and data without heavy load or heavy coding. In my current organization, we use the AWS cloud, and IBM...
What advice do you have for others considering IBM App Connect?
We are using the private cloud deployment on AWS. My company purchased IBM App Connect through the AWS Marketplace. IBM App Connect is a very user-friendly tool, and we can very easily integrate wi...
Which ETL tool would you recommend to populate data from OLTP to OLAP?
There are two products I know about * TimeXtender : Microsoft based, Transformation logic is quiet good and can easily be extended with T-SQL , Has a semantic layer that generates metat data for cu...
 

Also Known As

IBM Cast Iron
Compose, Attunity Compose
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

United Way of Allegheny County, Saint-Gobain CPS, Ricoh, SunTrust Banks Inc.
Poly-Wood
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