We performed a comparison between Informatica Powercenter and SSIS based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Informatica PowerCenter is a more advanced option if you can afford the higher price. However, SSIS scored better in terms of ease of deployment and service and support.
"It provides monitoring and we can therefore be aware of what is happening when we are handling jobs."
"It provides everything I need. Nothing is missing. PowerCenter is a good tool for on-premise databases."
"Has a good visual tool for data mapping."
"The interface is very clean and clear."
"It is easy to use, and it is quick for developing things. It is fairly powerful, and it can integrate with a lot of different platforms without much hassle."
"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."
"It's very easy to use it to develop mappings and workflows."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring tools and the reporting manager."
"The technical support is very good."
"SSIS' most valuable feature is its reporting services."
"Overall, it's a good product."
"The solution is stable."
"The workflow features have been very valuable. You can have automated workflows and all the steps are controlled. The workflow functionality of integration services is excellent."
"The most valuable feature of SSIS is that it can handle real complex transformations."
"I have used most of the standard SQL features, but the ones that stand out are the Data Flows and Bulk Import."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the fast insert and fuzzy logic matching."
"The reputation of Informatica is that it is expensive."
"There can be scalability issues. Huge amounts of data ingestion will impact performance."
"We had stability issues, mostly with JVM size."
"The licensing cost for Informatica is very high. Other all-in-one solutions have much lower prices than Informatica."
"The documentation could be improved."
"The performance of Informatica PowerCenter could improve."
"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."
"As a connector to big data, it is not well developed. We've had problems connecting Informatica with Hadoop. The functionality to connect Informatica with Hadoop, for me it's not good."
"We In upgrading SSIS, we encountered challenges fixing SQL Server and performance issues, including problems during a failover in our data warehouse."
"The debugging could be improved because when it came to solving the errors that I've experienced in the past, I've had to look at the documentation for more information."
"It's a legacy tool, that is nearing the end of its useful life."
"Video training would be a helpful addition."
"We've had issues in terms of the amount of data that is transferred when we are scheduling."
"The performance of this solution is not as good as other tools in the market."
"We would like the solution to be expanded so that it is available for other platforms than just Microsoft."
"We purchase an add on called task factory primarily to allow bulk delete, update and upsert capability. I'd like to see this be part of the standard package."
Informatica PowerCenter is ranked 3rd in Data Integration with 78 reviews while SSIS is ranked 2nd in Data Integration with 68 reviews. Informatica PowerCenter is rated 8.0, while SSIS is rated 7.8. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SSIS writes "Maintaining the solution and contacting its support team is easy". Informatica PowerCenter is most compared with Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Azure Data Factory, Databricks, AWS Glue and Informatica PowerExchange, whereas SSIS is most compared with Talend Open Studio, Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), IBM InfoSphere DataStage, AWS Glue and Azure Data Factory. See our Informatica PowerCenter vs. SSIS report.
See our list of best Data Integration vendors.
We monitor all Data Integration reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
Curious why you would compare these 2 tools and why you wouldn't be looking for a PaaS solution?
SSIS is free verses Informatica is the opposite. But there are no plans to fully embrace SSIS within Azure. They have moved to ADF and Synapse pipelines.
That said there is IR (Integration Runtime) so you can run SSIS in Azure but it's limited in terms of SSIS add-ons. Clearly, the future for Microsoft is Azure and Synapse so don't count on SSIS staying around for many more years.
In fact, the BiXpress add-on has been deprecated by its new owner. And I would NOT recommend using SSIS without BiXpress as its built-in logging and error control is awful.
I'm looking at us migrating from SSIS to ADF over the next few years.
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 components and connect cloud and on-premises data sources. We find it very useful for connecting traditional data sources, big data, and NoSQL.
We like that it can carry out simple and complex transformations. It is easy to use and helps us connect with multiple systems and web services. It makes it really easy for developers to develop production SSIS packages. It helps us to pull data because it is DBA-friendly.
However, the filtering of the tasks is a bit difficult, and the error messages can be confusing and hard to resolve.
That’s why, when evaluating both solutions, we ultimately decided to go with Informatica PowerCenter. This metadata-driven integration tool is easy to use and effective even when creating complex mapping. It is easy to monitor jobs, create workflows, and detect bugs. It is well suited for handling a low volume of records, therefore maintaining a real-time operation at an affordable cost.
Another advantage is that it works with ETL-type data integration, connecting to almost all types of database systems. It has great support and documentation, too. Informatica PowerCenter can address different data quality issues, such as data masking and virtualization. It has supporting tools for big data as well. It is critical to ensure we can feed on multiple data streams and transform them into usable data in the data warehouse.
There are a few downsides, though. There aren’t many scheduling options, and debugging the workflows is kind of hard.
Conclusions:
Overall, SSIS is a very good group of tools. For organizations used to working with MS products, it provides easy integration and connections between databases. Since we work with a small number of records, the Informatica PowerCenter works better for us.