IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs SAP Data Services comparison

IBM and SAP are both solutions in the Data Integration category. IBM is ranked #26 with an average rating of 7.0, while SAP is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.2. IBM holds a 1.8% mindshare in DI, compared to SAP’s 1.9% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of SAP users who would recommend it.

IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Read 13 IBM Cloud Pak for Data reviews

2,186 Views
2,055 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

SAP Data Services

Read 51 SAP Data Services reviews

4,545 Views
2,682 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

IBM Cloud Pak for Data

SAP Data Services

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

SAP Data Services and IBM Cloud Pak for Data compete in the data integration and management category. IBM Cloud Pak for Data has an edge with its cloud-native capabilities, making it more versatile in diverse IT landscapes, while SAP Data Services is beneficial for SAP-centric environments due to its robust integration.

Features: SAP Data Services is strong in data migration and integration with features such as Data Quality Transforms that simplify ETL processes. It provides excellent synergy with SAP ecosystems. IBM Cloud Pak for Data offers Watson Studio for AI-driven solutions and extensive data virtualization, supporting diverse IT environments and advanced data governance.

Room for Improvement: SAP Data Services needs better support for web service integrations and enhanced error logging. Improving its integration with non-SAP systems and scheduling features is essential. IBM Cloud Pak for Data should streamline its setup process and improve integration with other cloud services. Enhancing AI lifecycle management and connector integration would broaden its application.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SAP Data Services is suitable for on-premises and hybrid deployments, while IBM Cloud Pak for Data supports both hybrid and public cloud environments. Customer service for both products is rated similarly, with a need for faster response times, particularly for IBM Cloud Pak's cloud-related support.

Pricing and ROI: SAP Data Services is perceived as more expensive, particularly for smaller businesses, but it offers significant ROI with rapid deployment and improved data quality. IBM Cloud Pak for Data, while also expensive, offers competitive pricing for its features, delivering good ROI for large enterprises with strategic implementations.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs. SAP Data Services Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs. SAP Data Services

September 2025

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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 Cloud Pak for Data

Ranking in Data Integration

26th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Virtualization (3rd)

SAP Data Services

Ranking in Data Integration

10th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Quality (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of IBM Cloud Pak for Data is 1.8%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Data Services is 1.9%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Integration Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
SAP Data Services	1.9%
IBM Cloud Pak for Data	1.8%
Other	96.3%

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Michelle Leslie

Data asset management engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

Starts strong with data management capabilities but needs a demo database

What I would love to see is an end-to-end, almost a training demo database of some sort, where one of the biggest problems with data management is demonstrated. There are so many components to data management, and more often than not, people understand one thing really well. They may understand DataStage and how to move data around, but they do not see the impact of moving data incorrectly. They also do not see the impact of everyone understanding a piece of data in the same way. I would love Cloud Pak to come with a demo database that illustrates the different components of data management in a logical way, so I can see the whole picture instead of just the area I'm specializing in. It would be great if Cloud Pak, from a data modeling point of view, allowed us to import our PDMs, for example. It would be ideal to import and create business terms in Cloud Pak. The PEA would be great to create the technical data. The association between the business and the technical metadata could then be automated by pulling it through from your ACE models. The data modeling component is available in Cloud Pak. Additionally, when it comes to Cloud Pak, even though it has the NextGen DataStage built into it, there is Cloud Pak for data integration as well. Currently, I do not think we have a full enough understanding of how CP4D and CP4I can enhance each other.

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Ramesh Pampana

Manager, SAP Practice at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Has consistently provided impressive data handling capabilities and robust security features

Some of the most valuable features of SAP Data Services include data extraction where SAP is the best in that perspective, but when it comes to analytics or the reporting tool, I prefer to connect with Microsoft Power BI, which is a fantastic tool. Typically, from an end-user perspective, SAP has a huge amount of data, in terms of terabytes of data, but when you analyze that, the best form of visualization is always through Microsoft Power BI. SAP Data Services provides a best-in-class return on investment, as SAP's vision and forecast are absolutely amazing. They are ahead of technology, building an ecosystem that meets the standards of the fast-changing digital economy. SAP is indeed good at all this now, with so many components such as SAP Signavio, SAP EINS, SAP Work Zone, SAP ALM, Cloud ALM, SAP public cloud, SAP private cloud, and BTP, all of which are essential to meet the latest cutting-edge technologies.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of IBM Cloud Pak for Data are the Watson Studio, where we can initiate more groups and write code. Additionally, Watson Machine Learning is available with many other services, such as APIs which you can plug the machine learning models."

"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."

"I love the way that I can start at a very basic level with my data management journey by capturing my policies, justifying my data, and putting them into different categories to say this is data relating to individuals, for example, or data relating to geography."

"Its data preparation capabilities are highly valuable."

"IBM Watson Catalog and data pipelines are the most valuable features of the solution."

"Cloud Pak is a very, very, very good system."

"You can model the data there, connect the data models with the business processes and create data lineage processes."

More IBM Cloud Pak for Data pros

"The basic functionality is quite good as is the basic logic and data information."

"SAP Data Services provides a best-in-class return on investment, as SAP's vision and forecast are absolutely amazing."

"The BA reporting tools, such as Data Services, and ETL tool in SAP Data Services are the most valuable. When we had in-memory requirements, we used HANA. HANA is most preferably for most the customers for in-memory. SAP is the first company that created the in-memory concept."

"One of the most valuable features is that it is integrated."

"The reporting on the data, even from third-party software, is very good."

"The product's most valuable features are data validation and rules."

"The most valuable feature of SAP Data Services is the integration with data sources."

"Data Services' table comparison mechanism is very powerful. It's pretty hard to find a similar feature in other solutions."

More SAP Data Services pros

Cons

"The product must improve its performance."

"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 solution's user experience is an area that has room for improvement."

"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 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."

"What I would love to see is an end-to-end, almost a training demo database of some sort, where one of the biggest problems with data management is demonstrated."

"The product is trying to be more maturity in terms of connectors. That, I believe, is an area where Cloud Pak can improve."

"There is a solution that is part of IBM Cloud Pak for Data called Watson OpenScale. It is used to monitor the deployed models for the quality and fairness of the results. This is one area that needs a lot of improvement."

More IBM Cloud Pak for Data cons

"The skillset of data engineers matters a bit to use all the functionality of this solution. Otherwise, the delivery speed won't be faster."

"The solution should improve connectivity with more source systems and target systems."

"There needs to be multi-language support, however, my understanding is they are working on multi-language now."

"The pricing of the solution should be improved."

"Newer feature integration is lagging behind the company acquisitions and the product could do more to service a broader range of devices."

"We would like the different tools offered within this solution to be available as standalone entities, rather than having to purchase the entire package when we only require a few features."

"Scheduling of jobs in the sequence is not available. It's a very tedious process to do that particular task. If there was a tool to schedule in the sequence that would be extremely helpful."

"It would be nice if this solution was a bit easier to move from development to production."

More SAP Data Services cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's quite expensive."

"Cloud Pak's cost is a little high."

"The solution is expensive."

"IBM Cloud Pak for Data is expensive. If we include the training time and the machine learning, it's expensive. The cost of the execution is more reasonable."

"For the licensing of the solution, there is a yearly payment that needs to be made. Also, since it is expensive, cost-wise, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten."

"I don't have the exact licensing cost for IBM Cloud Pak for Data, as my company is still finalizing requirements, including monthly, yearly, and three-year licensing fees. Still, on a scale of one to five, I'd rate it a three because, compared to other vendors, it's more complicated."

"The solution's pricing is competitive with that of other vendors."

"I think that this product is too expensive for smaller companies."

"The pricing is a little high to make the product more competetive in the marketplace."

"The license price is expensive but medium to large-scale companies, should be able to afford it. Other solutions, such as Talend are easier to afford for smaller companies. Depending on the sources of the data where you are receiving your data you could be paying for more than one license."

"The price is very reasonable."

"Its pricing is as per the enterprise agreement and not a concern for us."

"Pricing is good, there is no problem."

"Speaking about prices, Oracle and SAP are market leaders. So, the prices are more."

"There is a one time purchase fee plus annual maintenance."

"The enterprise version of SAP Data Services is free."

More SAP Data Services pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

28%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	36

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Cloud Pak for Data?

The setup cost is very expensive. The cost depends on the pieces of the solution I'm using, how much data I have, and whether it's on the cloud or on-prem.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Cloud Pak for Data?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for IBM Cloud Pak for Data?

My primary use case for Cloud Pak is that I am the reference Data steward for the Africa regions in the banks where I work. My main objective is to capture the reference data in Caltech or Data and...

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How do you evaluate the ratio of price to quality for SAP Data Services?

I believe the license for the product is fair, even though some competitors offer similar services at lower prices. The difference between the Edge edition and the next one up is significant in pr...

See all answers

Would you recommend SAP Data Services to complete beginners?

I think after some preparation, a beginner will be able to use SAP Data Services, however, if you are completely unprepared, you may have some issues. I think that in particular you will need a mo...

See all answers

How has SAP Data Services helped your organization?

SAP Data Services has helped our whole staff understand the data across various sources and systems within the company. Not everyone who works at my organization is an IT expert - most just have av...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM InfoSphere DataStage vs IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Compared 44% of the time

Denodo vs IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Compared 13% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Compared 11% of the time

Palantir Foundry vs IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Compared 8% of the time

More IBM Cloud Pak for Data Competitors

Syniti Data Quality vs SAP Data Services

Compared 19% of the time

Palantir Foundry vs SAP Data Services

Compared 8% of the time

Informatica PowerCenter vs SAP Data Services

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs SAP Data Services

Compared 6% of the time

SSIS vs SAP Data Services

Compared 5% of the time

More SAP Data Services Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cloud Pak for Data

October 2025

Download IBM Cloud Pak for Data product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP Data Services

September 2025

Download SAP Data Services product report

Also Known As

Cloud Pak for Data

SAP BusinessObjects Data Services, SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator, BusinessObjects Data Integrator

Overview

IBM Cloud Pak® for Data is a fully-integrated data and AI platform that modernizes how businesses collect, organize and analyze data to infuse AI throughout their organizations. Cloud-native by design, the platform unifies market-leading services spanning the entire analytics lifecycle. From data management, DataOps, governance, business analytics and automated AI, IBM Cloud Pak for Data helps eliminate the need for costly, and often competing, point solutions while providing the information architecture you need to implement AI successfully.

Building on the streamlined hybrid-cloud foundation of Red Hat® OpenShift®, IBM Cloud Pak for Data takes advantage of the underlying resource and infrastructure optimization and management. The solution fully supports multicloud environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud™ and private cloud deployments. Find out how IBM Cloud Pak for Data can lower your total cost of ownership and accelerate innovation.

IBM

SAP Data Services is a top-ranking data integration and data quality tool. This is a product that aims to provide its users with effective access to their data in order to transform it and connect it to various business processes. SAP Data Services offers companies detailed data insights which improve decision-making and make company operations more effective.

Organizations can increase the value of their structured and unstructured data with the functionalities of this product regarding data integration, quality, and cleansing. Through various components such as:

Simplified maintenance
On-premises deployment
Data quality and integration
Intuitive user interfaces

the product transforms data into a ready-to-use resource for business insights.

Some of the key components of SAP Data Services include:

Universal data access
Native-text data processing
Intuitive user interfaces
Data quality dashboards
Simplified data governance
Scalability and high performance

Through these components, the product allows its clients to access and integrate data sources and targets with native connectors. Users can derive meaning from unstructured text data, match data to reduce duplicates, and see the impact of data quality issues. The tool also offers the option to enable parallel processing, bulk data loading, and grid computing for high-volume data loads.

SAP Data Services Features

The solution has different features for data integration, data quality, data profiling, and processing of text data. Using these features, clients can manage their company's data easily and achieve excellent results by optimizing it. Some of the product’s features include:

Data integration capabilities: The features regarding data integration provide a wide variety of opportunities. The product is available in 31 languages and connects to many data sources, providing its clients with access to their data anywhere at any time. It is also integrated with the SAP Business Suite applications, allowing users the full experience that the company has to offer. The tool is interconnected with SAP Data Hub, orchestrating data flows through the SAP Data Intelligence solution. Additionally, it supports a large number of third-party data sources, it is optimized for SAP HANA, and provides fine-tuned data replication and transformation through unique mechanisms.
Data quality capabilities: Clients can use a single interface to access designing, testing, debugging, editing, running, maintaining, and monitoring of data integration and data quality. It allows for the delivery of ready-to-use transformations and exposes hidden problems in users' data. With this feature, clients can build a single version of their data that is most efficient for them.
Data profiling capabilities: Companies that work with high-volume data can employ parallel processing, bulk data loading, and grid computing to be able to operate with the data more efficiently. This feature enables unlimited scalability and high availability by various automations. It also provides excellent security for the treated data through encryption and other services.
Processing of text data capabilities: This feature allows users to extract data from unstructured texts and understand it better. It works with 220 different file and text formats and 31 languages.

SAP Data Services Benefits

This solution offers various benefits to its clients regarding the efficient operation of their data. The key benefits of SAP Data Services include:

Broad access to data which can build a better perspective for companies of their information.
Improved decision-making and information management due to efficient data operations.
Ability to utilize various tools to help unify data on premises, in the cloud, or within big data.
The software provides efficient insight for reporting and data analytics.
The tool allows for easy integration with a large number of different databases.
The product provides the opportunity to seamlessly connect with other SAP solutions.
The solution simplifies extract, transform, and load (ETL) construction processes through intuitive graphic software.

Reviews from Real Users

According to Michael Lutz, senior data warehouse developer at Fox Chase Cancer Center, SAP Data Services is a powerful tool that does a lot.

An associate consultant at a consultancy says the tool is easy to use, simple to implement, and offers very good mapping capabilities.

SAP

Sample Customers

Qatar Development Bank, GuideWell, Skanderborg Music Festival

EMC Corporation, LivePerson, Eldorado, Mozzart, The VELUX Group, AOK Bundesverband, Hilti Group, Nissha Printing Company Ltd., Asian Paints, Aareal Bank Group, Migros Group

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cloud Pak for Data vs. SAP Data Services

September 2025

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