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 is UI friendly and has all the advantages of an ETL tool."
"Once you have learned Informatica, it is very easy to use."
"It's a very powerful tool you can use to load data, get data, do the drawing between the tables, and put into the packet in a very fast way."
"The support is valuable. There are also open-source ETL products, which work very well, but there is no support. When we face a production problem, being able to get support is valuable, and it brings efficiency. With an open-source solution, we can't engage anyone to resolve the problem as quickly as possible."
"The setup is very simple."
"It has good standard features for ETL development."
"It's a complete package, which is why we use this solution."
"The most valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is data transformation and user-friendliness."
"It is easy to set up. The deployment is also very quick."
"It is easy to set up the solution."
"We like that this solution includes a developer edition, free of charge, to allow for training."
"The scalability of SSIS is good."
"SSIS' best feature is SFTP connectivity."
"The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward."
"It's a competent product."
"The performance and stability are good."
"Integrating new tools can be tricky and challenging."
"If we could have the option of performance improvement within Informatica, and if it could have more features, that would be ideal."
"It should be more cloud-centric than on-prem-centric."
"If you want to transfer a ZIP file, it is a pain. You need to use Command-Line. Sometimes we just want to transfer a file. It should be easy to move them from A to B."
"Its interface can be modernized. It is an old product. I have been working with it for 14 years, and it still looks the same. It hasn't been modernized much. It also needs to handle more modern formats, such as JSON files. It works with the old text files and databases, but it does not always work with the newer, modern stuff. You need to make your own programs to support that kind of stuff. Support is also a kind of difficult with Informatica. They don't do direct support and rely on using their distributors around the globe for support, which means that you kind of have to go through this layer of different companies before you get help."
"In terms of performance improvement and tuning, there should be a bit more guidance and documentation."
"It would be nice to have all tools in one place. CDC needs more effort, as it's only easy to develop if you are familiar with Linux."
"The developer tool documentation can be enhanced with a more clear explanation of each utility, accompanied by relevant examples, so that developers are able to create programs with ease."
"There was also not enough instructions from Microsoft in regards to this application or this technology, which can easily be improved upon."
"It should have other programming languages supported as well from a scripting perspective. Currently, only C# and VB.NET are supported, which limits it to .NET. It should have Java support as well."
"We In upgrading SSIS, we encountered challenges fixing SQL Server and performance issues, including problems during a failover in our data warehouse."
"SSIS should be made a little bit more intuitive and user-friendly because it needs an expert-level person to work on it."
"Sometimes when we want to publish to other types of databases it's not easy to publish to those databases. For example, the Jet Database Engine. Before the SSIS supported Jet Database Engine but nowadays it doesn't support the Jet Database Engine. We connect to many databases such as Access database, SparkPros databases and the other types of databases using Jet Database Engines now and SSIS now doesn't seem to support it in our databases."
"I come from a coding background and this tool is graphically based. Sometimes I think it's cumbersome to do mapping graphically. If there was a way to provide a simple script, it would be helpful and make it easier to use."
"The creation of the measure in the DAC's model could be improved."
"SSIS can improve by the minimum code requirements in stored procedures and exporting data is difficult. They could make it easier, it should be as easy as it is to import data."
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.
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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.