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Informatica PowerCenter vs SAP Replication Server comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

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 Integration
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (12th)
SAP Replication Server
Ranking in Data Integration
40th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (20th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Informatica PowerCenter is 3.7%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Replication Server is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Informatica PowerCenter3.7%
SAP Replication Server0.8%
Other95.5%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Garima Goel - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Principal Engineer at Nagarro
Has supported complex data pipeline creation but performance tuning and monitoring responsiveness need improvement
Sometimes, I see various performance issues with Informatica PowerCenter, including caching concerns, whether it's a joiner transformation or other transformations, so I believe the team can enhance the performance perspectives of these transformations. Additionally, sometimes the Informatica Monitor hangs or takes time to open the current run or logs, which the team can also look into. Informatica is transitioning to cloud solutions and discontinuing on-premise support after 2026, so when we discuss Informatica Cloud and its support, it becomes quite expensive for the organization compared to peers such as SnapLogic or Netezza, which offer lower pricing. Informatica Cloud Intelligence's pricing is notably high.
reviewer1834542 - PeerSpot reviewer
Finance Business Process Improvement, Transformation and Project Management at a consultancy with self employed
Eliminates replication and allows you to use only one database, speeding up performance and reducing amount of storage
The private solution is expensive. If you're in a situation where you're paying IBM or AWS or somebody just to host you specifically, you're paying people to run it and you're taking care of all the upgrades. As a company, you're either hiring or paying an outsourcer to do that, and you have to manage it, keep up with the updates to the hardware, software, and the operating system. It's very expensive because there's a lot to control and take care of.

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 aspects of Informatica PowerCenter are the many features, ease of use, and user-friendliness."
"We use Informatica PowerCenter to transfer the transitional database to and from the data warehouse. This is very efficient as it enables us to quickly find our data reports and the data, so we can build AI models."
"It is UI friendly and has all the advantages of an ETL tool."
"The solution is stable."
"The functions in Informatica PowerCenter that I have found most valuable are the way it manages the volume of data, the push down optimization, and the performance aspects of it, mostly related to parallelism techniques."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring tools and the reporting manager."
"Technical support, and their approach is good. They have a support portal and support tickets. If you open a ticket it has multiple levels of severity from level one to very high or critical."
"The partitioning and optimization to help enhance our development is a very valuable aspect of Informatica PowerCenter."
"It speeds up the performance in terms of how fast you are able to access the data, look at it, get it reported to you, and send it to somebody. It also reduces the amount of storage."
"We can customize any workflow and we also like the business domain modeling that can be done."
"It's pretty good at handling replication, even under high load. It also provides cross-database replication, for example, from Sybase to Oracle."
"SAP is renovating different things. We are using external tools to connect as of now. It is going well, and now the new generation integration platforms are going to be pretty easy."
"SAP Replication Server is an application that I consider to be a robust system. It has proven to be highly reliable in my experience."
 

Cons

"The solution must improve the integration with new services."
"With all these no code/low code platforms, Informatica still forces us to use the ANSI format of SQL for joins, especially left outer join."
"Its scalability can be improved. It is not scalable."
"Some of the conversions are done inside the product. We use work tables that are created by the engine itself, but the names of the work tables are very long, and they don't have any meaning, which makes it a bit difficult to understand and follow exactly what is happening inside."
"The initial setup is not straightforward. You need expertise to do it."
"Informatica PowerCenter is outdated and would benefit from modernization. They should have a very good migration strategy from Informatica PowerCenter to AACF. Informatica PowerCenter there is no point in using it, you have to use a cloud version."
"This solution needs the functionality to do batch processing of data. It also lacks connectivity to NoSQL, unstructured data sources."
"Integrated Reporting service should be more smoothly transitioned from view to function to be in sync with the main design."
"I would like to see it become mobile-friendly."
"The private solution is expensive. If you're in a situation where you're paying IBM or AWS or somebody just to host you specifically, you're paying people to run it and you're taking care of all the upgrades."
"If someone wants to replicate their data from Sybase to a newer technology for data warehousing or other purposes, it would be better if they supported those."
"Improvement is a never ending story, and HANA is doing some improvements. We are able to adopt that, and we have to do it by integration with HANA. They are very major changes that we need to see."
"There is room for improvement in terms of pricing and faster support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its maintenance is expensive."
"We are using an annual license for Informatica PowerCenter."
"The solution is in the middle price range compared to other solutions."
"Since the solution's cost is higher, I rate the pricing as a five out of ten."
"A basic setup can be from $100,000 and up annually."
"It is for big enterprises. We have leveraged Informatica for big enterprises but not for small and medium enterprises because it is a very costly product as compared to other products. We propose this solution only for enterprise customers. For small to medium enterprises, we would propose the Microsoft solution. Its licensing is currently bundle-wise. It should be features-wise and not bundle-wise."
"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."
"Our customers pay a licensing fee yearly."
"It's a very expensive solution."
"You can pick one of the hosted cloud services as opposed to owning it and doing it yourself. Your cost of ownership on the hardware, the data storage, and the maintenance all go down. It depends on what service you use."
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Comparison Review

it_user90069 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Expert at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
8%
Retailer
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise72
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

How does Azure Data Factory compare with Informatica PowerCenter?
Azure Data Factory is flexible, modular, and works well. In terms of cost, it is not too pricey. It offers the stability and reliability I am looking for, good scalability, and is easy to set up an...
Which is better - SSIS or Informatica PowerCenter?
SSIS PowerPack is a group of drag and drop connectors for Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services, commonly called SSIS. The collection helps organizations boost productivity with code-free compo...
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...
What needs improvement with SAP Replication Server?
SAP can provide better support for cross-database replication to newer technologies. The product supports Oracle, but I am not aware of what other technologies it supports. If someone wants to repl...
What is your primary use case for SAP Replication Server?
It's basically to transfer data from one server to another. It's used for this purpose.
 

Also Known As

PowerCenter
Sybase Replication Server
 

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 Replication Server and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
879,889 professionals have used our research since 2012.