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IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer vs Melissa Data Quality comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 6, 2025

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 Infosphere Information ...
Ranking in Data Quality
9th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Melissa Data Quality
Ranking in Data Quality
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Scrubbing Software (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Quality category, the mindshare of IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer is 2.9%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Melissa Data Quality is 4.0%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Quality Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer2.9%
Melissa Data Quality4.0%
Other93.1%
Data Quality
 

Featured Reviews

Tirthankar Roy Chowdhury - PeerSpot reviewer
Teamlead at Tata consultancy services
Accessible from anywhere and easy to learn even for non-technical users, but needs more connectors and faster issue resolution from technical support
What could be improved or added to IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer is more connectors. This solution comes in a package with IBM InfoSphere DataStage and is missing a lot of connectors to various, new data sources, so IBM needs to work on that area. Compared with competitors such as Informatica and Alation which acquired other small companies to work on the connectors, IBM has not done any testing and has tried to develop the connectors in-house, but that's taking a lot of time. As a result, my company is unable to connect to a lot of data sources, particularly modern data sources.
GM
Data Architect at World Vision
SSIS MatchUp Component is Amazing
- Scalability is a limitation as it is single threaded. You can bypass this limitation by partitioning your data (say by alphabetic ranges) into multiple dataflows but even within a single dataflow the tool starts to really bog down if you are doing survivorship on a lot of columns. It's just very old technology written that's starting to show its age since it's been fundamentally the same for many years. To stay relavent they will need to replace it with either ADF or SSIS-IR compliant version. - Licensing could be greatly simplified. As soon as a license expires (which is specific to each server) the product stops functioning without prior notice and requires a new license by contacting the vendor. And updating the license is overly complicated. - The tool needs to provide resizable forms/windows like all other SSIS windows. Vendor claims its an SSIS limitation but that isn't true since pretty much all SSIS components are resizable except theirs! This is just an annoyance but needless impact on productivity when developing new data flows. - The tool needs to provide for incremental matching using the MatchUp for SSIS tool (they provide this for other solutions such as standalone tool and MatchUp web service). We had to code our own incremental logic to work around this. - Tool needs ability to sort mapped columns in the GUI when using advanced survivorship (only allowed when not using column-level survivorship). - It should provide an option for a procedural language (such as C# or VB) for survivor-ship expressions rather than relying on SSIS expression language. - It should provide a more sophisticated ability to concatenate groups of data fields into common blocks of data for advanced survivor-ship prioritization (we do most of this in SQL prior to feeding the data to the tool). - It should provide the ability to only do survivor-ship with no matching (matching is currently required when running data through the tool). - Tool should provide a component similar to BDD to enable the ability to split into multiple thread matches based on data partitions for matching and survivor-ship rather than requiring custom coding a parallel capable solution. We broke down customer data by first letter of last name into ranges of last names so we could run parallel data flows. - Documentation needs to be provided that is specific to MatchUp for SSIS. Most of their wiki pages were written for the web service API MatchUp Object rather than the SSIS component. - They need to update their wiki site documentation as much of it is not kept current. Its also very very basic offering very little in terms of guidelines. For example, the tool is single-threaded so getting great performance requires running multiple parallel data flows or BDD in a data flow which you can figure out on your own but many SSIS practitioners aren't familiar with those techniques. - The tool can hang or crash on rare occasions for unknown reason. Restarting the package resolves the problem. I suspect they have something to do with running on VM (vendor doesn't recommend running on VM) but have no evidence to support it. When it crashes it creates dump file with just vague message saying the executable stopped running.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Information Analyzer is still a good product."
"For basic Business Rule Creation to cleanse Legacy data, it worked as intended."
"You can also schedule and run data quality on the critical data elements on the databases."
"This tool would be very beneficial if used before a data migration or BI project as an initial phase to know the data exactly, and to figure out all data possible scenarios which we might face."
"What's most useful in IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer is you can access it from anywhere. It's also pretty easy to learn, so even non-technical business people use it and found the solution easy to learn."
"My advice to others who want to start using IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer is that it's a very good product because it has a lot of handy features, and it's a product that's easier to learn and that even non-technical people can use it."
"Provides simplicity, ease of use, combined with overall accuracy of data."
"The pricing is very competitive and the product is robust enough to get the job done."
"Trial subscriptions (via cloud) are very cheap and easy to use."
"By using Melissa Data, we are able to scrub and verify, then better validate the end customer's address to ensure a more consistent delivery of products."
"​It has a straightforward, easy setup."
"Decreases chances of incorrect shipping addresses and, thus, returned packages."
"​Ability to keep our data set clean and usable for our community searches.​"
"By far the best pricing and licensing option we have found for a small organization, since we can buy credits in small increments and they don't expire."
 

Cons

"What could be improved or added to IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer is more connectors. This solution comes in a package with IBM InfoSphere DataStage and is missing a lot of connectors to various, new data sources, so IBM needs to work on that area. Compared with competitors such as Informatica and Alation which acquired other small companies to work on the connectors, IBM has not done any testing and has tried to develop the connectors in-house, but that's taking a lot of time. As a result, my company is unable to connect to a lot of data sources, particularly modern data sources."
"Customer Service: AverageTechnical Support: Not good"
"As of v9.1, the troubleshooting process is still painful."
"IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer, particularly its latest version, has some stability issues. My company faced some serious issues with stability and had to repeatedly go to IBM to have the issues fixed."
"Stopped using it. Took a loss."
"The solution is outdated and is not on cloud."
"Speed of delivery/ease of use. They advertise a 24-hour, next business day turn time on data annotation, but I’ve found it is usually closer to 72 hours. This is still excellent, just make sure you add in the appropriate fluff to your delivery timelines."
"An area for improvement is where an end customer's address is not found in the Melissa Data database, even though it is a valid address."
"Needs to provide more phone numbers, even cell numbers (scrubbed numbers)."
"I wish there was a way to do a "test run" and see what a particular format will give you."
"MatchUp seems to be single threaded, and limits the amount of data that can be processed automatically."
"Update feature"
"Needs more/better search tools are needed. Also, state and local tax data would be nice."
"Tech support at Melissa Data was very quick to wash their hands of an issue and say it's IT policies on my side that are causing the issue. There was no offer to try and find a work-around. Just an overwhelming attitude of "it’s not our problem.""
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For the licensing cost of IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer, I have no information on the exact cost, but as it's bundled with other IBM products such as IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog and IBM InfoSphere DataStage, the bundle is expensive when compared to competitor pricing."
"This vendor has no equal in pricing for equivalent functionality."
"Depends on situation. We prefer to have data onsite, but some might prefer web access."
"Be sure to determine how the data is priced (record-based versus credit-based or some hybrid of data and services)."
"Fully understand your volume, both monthly and annually. Speak with a Melissa account manager, they will put together an effective solution to meet your needs."
"The price for address validation is similar in all software. However, the price for geocoding decides the actual pricing. If you get their most accurate geocoding (called GeoPoints), then it will add about $10k+ per million requests."
"I think it's worth the value for me to run it."
"​We are concerned that our own pricing is going up every year for Melissa Data products, but we highly recommend the services for people who are routinely sending out mailings."
"​You should have a good idea of the size of your data and the amount of cleansing you will be doing, so you will purchase the appropriate size bundle.​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Healthcare Company
10%
Construction Company
20%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise14
 

Also Known As

Information Analyzer
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Integra LifeSciences, Longjiang Bank Corp., Webster University, Swedish Armed Forces, Edith Cowan University, Premier, PRISA Digital, TIAA CREF
Boeing Co., FedEx, Ford Motor Co, Hewlett Packard, Meade-Johnson, Microsoft, Panasonic, Proctor & Gamble, SAAB Cars USA, Sony, Walt Disney, Weight Watchers, and Intel.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer vs. Melissa Data Quality and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.