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Informatica PowerCenter vs SAP Lumira comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 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

Informatica PowerCenter
Ranking in Data Visualization
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
81
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (2nd)
SAP Lumira
Ranking in Data Visualization
23rd
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Data Visualization category, the mindshare of Informatica PowerCenter is 1.4%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Lumira is 0.8%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

Lars Borchers - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable and reliable product that provides a variety of features for data integration
The solution is not for newcomers. It has an old touch. The solution must improve the integration with new services. It was part of the program at Informatica when they moved to their cloud platform. It is integrated. However, from an on-premise perspective, we need to buy licenses for PowerExchange. If we want a native driver to access a special service, we need to extend our license to those services. It is expensive. I don't like that it's not all included in the solution.
Rafal Zaborowski - PeerSpot reviewer
It's stable, it keeps on improving and the technical support is excellent
I think a lot of users aren't having fun using SAP because it requires putting in a lot of information by keyboard directly because it requires some coding, so this is one area for improvement. From a user point of view, SAP is a complex system where you can learn and teach, so another area for improvement in the solution is that it needs to be more user-friendly. In the next release of SAP, I want it to have a friendlier menu for its users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Good interface, reasonable documentation."
"Once you figure it out, it is a powerful and simple ETL tool. Its stability has been very satisfactory."
"UI-based ability to create data mapping."
"We can scale the product."
"If the systems get migrated or upgraded, the amount of resources required are very minimal. We can change the connections and establish a new connection. It's very helpful."
"What I like the most is that we have to deal with less while writing the queries."
"Has a good visual tool for data mapping."
"I like the completeness of the way I can build ETL workflows."
"SAP Lumira is the best system in the world, at least in my opinion. I like that it's a stable system and that many people in my company have development experience in SAP Lumira. The solution keeps on improving and has excellent support."
"It is fairly easy and fast when it comes to using it."
"The best feature is the ease of developing dashboards."
"The most valuable features of SAP Lumira are the dashboards, geographical elements, and graph filtering, and the usage is similar to a website which makes it easy to use."
"Beautiful visualizations."
"Geographic hierarchy and the ability to connect with SAP sources, such as CRM, ERP, and BW."
"The most value that Lumira provides is in its ability to consume the Business Objects universe."
 

Cons

"The solution's commercial cost is very high. Other open-source tools can do the tool's functions for free. The world is moving to the cloud, but the solution hasn't updated its drivers. I presume that its downfall will start soon. The tool is trying to cross-sell or upsell without helping customers derive benefits from the existing products. They have multiple tools and licenses. It is better to bring the smaller tools in one umbrella."
"The licensing is difficult."
"While Informatica is great for data-integration, it does not have any analytics features. Thus, organizations have to always look for another product for their BI needs."
"We had to take on a large volume of data from the legacy Sybase system. This was taking a very long time, i.e., more than a day. We were trying to improve it with partitions to gpload, but we were told that we can't go more than four partitions."
"PowerCenter could integrate better with cloud applications. We had to do a lot of configuration work using API integrations to connect with cloud applications. Informatica Cloud Data Integration has a generic connector that you can use directly, so it's much easier."
"The performance of Informatica PowerCenter could improve."
"Include more instruments for LOGs analysis, interpretation, and job corrections."
"Informatica, in my opinion, is very rigid and not very flexible, whereas platforms like Alteryx or Matillion are very flexible and agile."
"It would be great to have more ETL capabilities so that the user can do more cleansing/mining on his/her side."
"Lumira uses a lot of memory resources, so the execution of dashboards is slow."
"SAP Lumira can improve if they game more capability to the end user to prepare dashboards because it's more of an IT task to create them. In Tableau, we can drag, drop, and create. However, in SAP Lumira, we need a designer and a separate KT to be able to do it well."
"I'm not a fan of using SAP Lumira because it requires putting in a lot of information by keyboard directly because it requires some coding, so this is one area for improvement. From a user point of view, SAP Lumira is a complex system to learn and teach, so another area for improvement in the solution is that it needs to be more user-friendly."
"It needs an easier printing feature."
"Lumira's capabilities feel like that of a store app with the intuitiveness of a desktop app, which is not a good combination."
"It needs the ability to drill down more. Analyzing data with Lumira at times becomes a bit difficult."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the solution's pricing a four out of ten. The price is very high, and it doesn't understand the market now."
"The price is mostly reasonable."
"We have a site license, but we do pay by the division."
"According to what I've heard and read on various blogs, it's quite expensive when compared to similar competitive products."
"I consider this to be an expensive product."
"Compared to other tools, I think PowerCenter is a bit expensive. When I compare it to Oracle, if you want to use Oracle databases, you can easily get an ODI tool, so it's easier to handle. Informatica is a standalone tool—it's an independent company—and there are no databases around them, so it's quite expensive to use. Generally, large companies use PowerCenter because of the price. If companies want to expand their usage areas, they try to consider if it's easy to implement and easy to understand the pricing. I think the pricing is a barrier for Informatica."
"Licensing is a one time cost. But maintenance costs depend on what you want, how long you need it. Maintenance is a kind of insurance. With health insurance, you don't know whether you will get sick or need to go to hospital or not but you have to have insurance. It's the same thing with support. If you have that expertise in resolving issues, if you have enough experience in your IT department, I would say you don't need the support. But in practice, they recommend you go with the support. If you want support you have to pay for it."
"The price of Informatica PowerCenter is expensive, but it does give value."
"In terms of cost, SAP Lumira is less affordable."
"PowerBI is way more capable at a much better price point: $10 per user without all the associated setup costs."
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Comparison Review

it_user90069 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 20, 2014
Informatica PowerCenter vs. Microsoft SSIS - each technology has its advantages but also have similarities
Technology has made it easier for businesses to organize and manipulate data to get a clearer picture of what’s going on with their business. Notably, ETL tools have made managing huge amounts of data significantly easier and faster, boosting many organizations’ business intelligence operations…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Hospitality Company
8%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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Which Informatica product would you choose - PowerCenter or Cloud Data Integration?
Complex transformations can easily be achieved using PowerCenter, which has all the features and tools to establish a real data governance strategy. Additionally, PowerCenter is able to manage huge...
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Also Known As

PowerCenter
SAP BusinessObjects Lumira
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, LexisNexis, Rabobank
Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Find out what your peers are saying about Informatica PowerCenter vs. SAP Lumira and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.