We performed a comparison between Informatica PowerCenter and StreamSets based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Integration solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."UI-based ability to create data mapping."
"It has good standard features for ETL development."
"The performance and design of Informatica have been very valuable. I find the performance faster than, say, Oracle Data Integrator or DataStage."
"Once you figure it out, it is a powerful and simple ETL tool. Its stability has been very satisfactory."
"Good interface, reasonable documentation."
"One of the most valuable features for us is the metadata repository because it can easily understand the lineage of first target mapping. My company and I also find Informatica really easy to use—when a consultant joins our company, in just a few days to a few weeks, they can understand how to use it—so we prefer to use this ETL tool."
"Deployment was simple and straightforward."
"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 most valuable feature is the pipelines because they enable us to pull in and push out data from different sources and to manipulate and clean things up within them."
"I really appreciate the numerous ready connectors available on both the source and target sides, the support for various media file formats, and the ease of configuring and managing pipelines centrally."
"The entire user interface is very simple and the simplicity of creating pipelines is something that I like very much about it. The design experience is very smooth."
"The UI is user-friendly, it doesn't require any technical know-how and we can navigate to social media or use it more easily."
"For me, the most valuable features in StreamSets have to be the Data Collector and Control Hub, but especially the Data Collector. That feature is very elegant and seamlessly works with numerous source systems."
"The ETL capabilities are very useful for us. We extract and transform data from multiple data sources, into a single, consistent data store, and then we put it in our systems. We typically use it to connect our Apache Kafka with data lakes. That process is smooth and saves us a lot of time in our production systems."
"It is a very powerful, modern data analytics solution, in which you can integrate a large volume of data from different sources. It integrates all of the data and you can design, create, and monitor pipelines according to your requirements. It is an all-in-one day data ops solution."
"The best thing about StreamSets is its plugins, which are very useful and work well with almost every data source. It's also easy to use, especially if you're comfortable with SQL. You can customize it to do what you need. Many other tools have started to use features similar to those introduced by StreamSets, like automated workflows that are easy to set up."
"The only problem with this product is the level of complexity with the number of levels of transformation that you have to go through."
"What I didn't like about it is that the platform itself is not great at distributed processing. When you need high parallel processing, it has some inherent issues. We had to use Java transformation, and it did not go very well. I have heard that it is going to the cloud, but we haven't tried that."
"Informatica, in my opinion, is very rigid and not very flexible, whereas platforms like Alteryx or Matillion are very flexible and agile."
"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 solution can improve by providing more connectivity by having native ODBC or JDBC connections available. It will be easier and more people could start using it."
"Compared to solutions offering similar functionalities, Informatica PowerCenter is not very flexible regarding customized integrations."
"It would be good to recreate the entire interface to make it easier for users to build workflows."
"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 the product, I don't think there is any room for improvement because it is very good. One small area of improvement that is very much needed is on the knowledge base side. Sometimes, it is not very clear how to set up a certain process or a certain node for a person who's using the platform for the first time."
"The software is very good overall. Areas for improvement are the error logging and the version history. I would like to see better, more detailed error logging information."
"StreamSets should provide a mechanism to be able to perform data quality assessment when the data is being moved from one source to the target."
"We create pipelines or jobs in StreamSets Control Hub. It is a great feature, but if there is a way to have a folder structure or organize the pipelines and jobs in Control Hub, it would be great. I submitted a ticket for this some time back."
"Sometimes, it is not clear at first how to set up nodes. A site with an explanation of how each node works would be very helpful."
"Visualization and monitoring need to be improved and refined."
"If you use JDBC Lookup, for example, it generally takes a long time to process data."
"The execution engine could be improved. When I was at their session, they were using some obscure platform to run. There is a controller, which controls what happens on that, but you should be able to easily do this at any of the cloud services, such as Google Cloud. You shouldn't have any issues in terms of how to run it with their online development platform or design platform, basically their execution engine. There are issues with that."
Informatica PowerCenter is ranked 3rd in Data Integration with 78 reviews while StreamSets is ranked 8th in Data Integration with 24 reviews. Informatica PowerCenter is rated 8.0, while StreamSets is rated 8.4. 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 StreamSets writes "We no longer need to hire highly skilled data engineers to create and monitor data pipelines". Informatica PowerCenter is most compared with Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Azure Data Factory, SSIS and Databricks, whereas StreamSets is most compared with Fivetran, Azure Data Factory, SSIS, IBM InfoSphere DataStage and Oracle GoldenGate. See our Informatica PowerCenter vs. StreamSets report.
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