We performed a comparison between Informatica PowerCenter, SAP Data Hub, and Zapier based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Oracle and others in Data Integration."The technical support for Informatica PowerCenter is good."
"It has very good monitoring and process monitoring."
"Technical support is great. It's one of the reasons we really like them. When you compare support from IBM and support from Informatica, Informatica is much better."
"What I like the most is that we have to deal with less while writing the queries."
"It is UI friendly and has all the advantages of an ETL tool."
"It works with any multi-databases, so it works with Sybase, SQL Server. Also, the performance is really good and it is easy to use."
"The partitioning and optimization to help enhance our development is a very valuable aspect of Informatica PowerCenter."
"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."
"Its connection to on-premise products is the most valuable. We mostly use the on-premise connection, which is seamless. This is what we prefer in this solution over other solutions. We are using it the most for the orchestration where the data is coming from different categories. Its other features are very much similar to what they are giving us in open source. Their push-down approach is the most advantageous, where they push most of the processing on to the same data source. This means that they have a serverless kind of thing, and they don't process the data inside a product such as Data Hub. They process the data from where the data is coming out. If it is coming from HANA, to capture the data or process it for analytics, orchestration, or management, they go to the HANA database and give it out. They don't process it on Data Hub. This push-down approach increases the processing speed a little bit because the data is processed where it is sitting. That's the best part and an advantage. I have used another product where they used to capture the data first and then they used to process it and give it. In Data Hub, it is in reverse. They process it first and give it, and then they put their own manipulations. They lead in terms of business functions. No other solution has business functions already implemented to perform business analysis. They have a lot of prebuilt business functions for machine learning and orchestration, which we can use directly to get an analysis out from the existing data. Most of the data is sitting as enterprise data there. That's a major advantage that they have."
"The most valuable feature is the S/4HANA 1909 On-Premise"
"SAP is one of the most seamless ERPs that have integrated SAP archiving within Excel. I have not seen this with any other database."
"We find it effortless to set up. We really don't have to do anything other than finding the application in the Zapier catalog. And as long as the application has been re-integrated into Zapier, they're able to then just provide the connection details and hook it up."
"There are a few valuable features, like the stability that it comes with and also the number of features that it offers. I've used other services like Pabbly, but they don't offer similar numbers of applications that Zapier has or allows to integrate with – it's maximum."
"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
"Zapier’s most valuable feature is its ability to interconnect applications or devices."
"The ability to connect web applications to trigger actions in another app after having enriched, formatted, delayed, grouped, and filtered is really valuable for many businesses."
"Zapier is a really good tool for connecting multiple different platforms and data sources. For example, with Quickbase, I can easily integrate data from other sources like AWS or task-tracking platforms such as ClickUp or Asana."
"With the previous CRM we were using – the Google Ads landing pages we had – we were collecting leads manually. That process was not efficient and took a sales team a lot of time to insert these leads manually. Currently, the process is smooth and we use Zapier to collect the leads for us."
"We can connect Zapier with Zoho CRM for lead generation. I like the tool's drag and drop feature."
"There can be scalability issues. Huge amounts of data ingestion will impact performance."
"The only problem with this product is the level of complexity with the number of levels of transformation that you have to go through."
"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."
"Integration with Artificial Intelligence would benefit this solution."
"Areas for improvement in Informatica PowerCenter include scalability and high availability or the clustering configuration because that's still very basic. The elasticity or scaling of the platform needs a lot of improvement. For example, when it comes to DR handling or building an active-active or active-passive cluster, Informatica PowerCenter is still not that powerful. Automation also needs improvement in the solution. Improving automation leads to some improvement in the stability of Informatica PowerCenter and other aspects related to it. What I'd like to see in the next release of Informatica PowerCenter is real-time capability because the solution is mainly for patches, and to have real-time integration, you need to count on some additional components from Informatica. I would expect more integration and a complete platform in terms of real-time capability or patching with minimal interventions or minimal components to be aligned together."
"There is a need to buy a separate license if one wishes to connect with some kind of SAP system, such as SalesForce."
"There is some room for improvement in terms of pricing."
"It would be good to recreate the entire interface to make it easier for users to build workflows."
"The company has everything offshore."
"Nowadays there are some inconsistencies in data bases, however, they upgrade and release the versions to market."
"In 2018, connecting it to outside sources, such as IoT products or IoT-enabled big data Hadoop, was a little complex. It was not smooth at the beginning. It was unstable. It took a lot of time for the initial data load. Sometimes, the connection broke, and we had to restart the process, which was a major issue, but they might have improved it now. It is very smooth with SAP HANA on-premise system, SAP Cloud Platform, and SAP Analytics Cloud. It could be because these are their own products, and they know how to integrate them. With Hadoop, they might have used open-source technologies, and that's why it was breaking at that time. They are providing less embedded integration because they want us to use their other products. For example, they don't want to go and remove SAP Analytics Cloud and put everything in Data Hub. They want us to use SAP Analytics Cloud somewhere else and not inside the Data Hub. On the integration part, it lacks real-time analytics, and it is slow. They should embed the SAP Analytics Cloud inside Data Hub or support some kind of analysis. They do provide some analysis, but it is not extensive. They are moreover open source. So, we need a lot of developers or data scientists to go in and implement Python algorithms. It would be better if they can provide their own existing algorithms and give some connections and drop-down menus to go and just configure those. It will make things really quick by increasing the embedded integrations. It will also improve the process efficiency and processing power. Its performance needs improvement. It is a little slow. It is not the best in the market, and there are other products that are much better than this. In terms of technology and performance, it is a little slow as compared to Microsoft and other data orchestration products. I haven't used other products, but I have read about those products, their settings, and the milliseconds that they do. In Azure Purview, they say that they can copy, manage, or transform the data within milliseconds. They say that they can transform 100 gigabytes of data within three to five seconds, which is something SAP cannot do. It generally takes a lot of time to process that much amount of data. However, I have never tested out Azure."
"I would like to see them improve the Quickbase integration. Currently, it only allows triggering actions when records are added, but it would be more useful if we could also trigger actions when records are modified or deleted."
"Zapier could be a little faster, but that might not be possible. I would encourage Zapier to make more API endpoints for each application"
"Zapier needs more YouTube or video tutorials or more training for people. That would help a lot. In particular, Zapier should have documentation for every connector. Its documentation needs to be more detailed and visual."
"With Zapier, improvements are required in the areas of concerns like bugs, ease of use, and documentation."
"My biggest concern with Zapier would be their pricing strategy."
"It could support various languages along with Python."
"At the moment, they allow a limited number of apps. I look forward to getting more apps for each package."
"System-to-system is fine, but when it comes to system-to-user, where Zapier is helping to communicate to a user, that's a one-way communication. If that user has to perform some action on that notification, the action isn't handled by Zapier. So there's no way to orchestrate that and it's very cumbersome."