We performed a comparison between IBM InfoSphere DataStage and Informatica PowerCenter 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."Offers great flexibility."
"The solution has improved the time it takes to perform tasks related to batch applications."
"The solution's scalability is really good...we are using multi-instance jobs where you can scale them easily."
"Finding logs is very easy on the solution."
"The performance optimization is quite good in DataStage. It provides parallelism and pipelining mechanisms"
"The best feature of IBM InfoSphere DataStage for me was that it was very much user-friendly. The solution didn't require that much raw coding because most of its features were drag and drop, plus it had a large number of functionalities."
"The ETL tools are probably the most valuable feature. It has an IBM tool, a friendly UI and it makes things more comfortable."
"I am impressed with the tool's ETL tracing."
"It reduces a lot of legacy coding."
"Good product if you are trying implement data quality, data integration, and data management projects."
"The partitioning and optimization to help enhance our development is a very valuable aspect of Informatica PowerCenter."
"The setup is straightforward."
"The technical support is excellent."
"The reliability of the product and the way of orchestration of different services is valuable to us."
"The most complex task, in this case, was to read and transform BLOB data, and Java transformation in Informatica Power Center was a great solution."
"Informatica PowerCenter is very good for integrating a huge amount of data in a very short duration, such as a minute. It is also very easy to use. After you provide the source and the target, mappings are automatically done, which makes it easy to use for the development team."
"What needs improvement in IBM InfoSphere DataStage is its pricing. The pricing for the solution is higher than its competitors, so a lot of the clients my company has worked with prefer other tools over IBM InfoSphere DataStage because of the high price tag. Another area for improvement in the solution stems from a lot of new types of databases, for example, databases in the cloud and big data have become available, and IBM InfoSphere DataStage is working on various connectors for different data sources, but that still isn't up-to-date, meaning that some connectors are missing for modern data sources. The latest version of IBM InfoSphere DataStage also has a complex architecture, so my team faced frequent outages and that should be improved as well."
"Working with some of the big data components is good, but I can see improvements are needed."
"Reduced cost would allow more customers to choose the product. It's quite expensive in relation to the cost of other similar solutions."
"The pricing should be lower."
"Their web interface is good but the on-prem sites are outdated. The solution could also be improved if they could integrate the data pipeline scheduling part of their interface."
"In the future, I would like to see more integration with cloud technologies."
"I really like this tool, but the administration should be on the same client application because a lot of administration features are not on the client-side, and they usually need to have administrative access. It's quite complicated to force IT teams to have separate administrative access from the developers."
"We would be happy to see in next versions the ability to return several parameters from jobs. Now, jobs can return just one parameter. If they could return several parameters, that would be great."
"The UI is outdated and old-fashioned, at least in our current version. Also, we have experienced some stability issues with the Workflow Monitor application."
"Integration with Artificial Intelligence would benefit this solution."
"What I didn't like about it is that the platform itself is not great at distributed processing. When you need high parallel processing, it has some inherent issues. We had to use Java transformation, and it did not go very well. I have heard that it is going to the cloud, but we haven't tried that."
"Now they are migrating to a new version, and they have something that is called Informatica Developer. Previously, they just had PowerCenter. Now, when they move everything to Informatica Developer it's not as good or stable like it was when it was PowerCenter, though it has some nice features. This Developer tool could be better."
"The licensing is difficult."
"If you want to transfer a ZIP file, it is a pain. You need to use Command-Line. Sometimes we just want to transfer a file. It should be easy to move them from A to B."
"What needs improvement in Informatica PowerCenter is the cloud experience because, nowadays, other companies, such as AWS, Azure, and Google, have more experience in the cloud. The pricing for Informatica PowerCenter on the cloud is also very expensive for customers, so some customers prefer open-source tools or lower-priced tools, such as Azure. From my point of view, Informatica must work on the pricing policy and review the policy on the cloud for Informatica PowerCenter or propose more tools with lower pricing. Clients want the automatic integration of Informatica PowerCenter with other tools. Currently, the integration process is manual, and you have to add other tools to facilitate the integration, especially with the DevOps methodology. You need scripts and tools for the integration, and you'll need to use other integration tools if you want automatic deployment for Informatica PowerCenter, so this is another area for improvement in the solution. What I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is for the integration with APIs to be simpler, because currently, the API integration feature of Informatica PowerCenter is very difficult. It's not intuitive. You have to facilitate API integration and the real-time streaming of messages in Kafka, for example, so that should be improved."
"Integrated Reporting service should be more smoothly transitioned from view to function to be in sync with the main design."
IBM InfoSphere DataStage is ranked 7th in Data Integration with 37 reviews while Informatica PowerCenter is ranked 3rd in Data Integration with 78 reviews. IBM InfoSphere DataStage is rated 7.8, while Informatica PowerCenter is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM InfoSphere DataStage writes "User-friendly with a lot of functions for transmission rules, but has slow performance and not suitable for a huge volume of data". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Informatica PowerCenter writes "Stable, provides good support, and integrating it with other systems is very fast, but its pricing is expensive". IBM InfoSphere DataStage is most compared with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, SSIS, Azure Data Factory, Talend Open Studio and IBM InfoSphere Information Server, whereas Informatica PowerCenter is most compared with Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Azure Data Factory, SSIS, Databricks and SAP Data Services. See our IBM InfoSphere DataStage vs. Informatica PowerCenter report.
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My experience with these products is telling me that:
- Informatica is much more flexible, it has more points, where different types of codding and tuning are available. If the landscape is heterogeneous and complex - it’s the right choice. On the other hand, it works more slowly.
- IBM DS is very strong in code efficiency and flows parallelism. If the landscape is IBM-oriented or not so complex, but data volumes are huge - it’s the right choice. On the other hand, coding and tuning abilities are more ascetic.
- Informatica needs dedicated admin in the project team, IBM DS - does not.
- Informatica has an evolving cloud version, IBM DS hasn’t yet.
- Informatica is not proper working with Hadoop, IBM DS is.
The pricing of both is more or less equal.