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Informatica PowerExchange vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.9
Informatica PowerExchange enables smarter decisions, streamlines data pipelines, and saves costs, showing ROI within weeks for digital transformation.
Sentiment score
7.9
Pentaho offers cost-effective integration, reducing ETL time, lowering expenses, and enhancing competitiveness with open-source flexibility and efficiency.
It is considered cost-efficient because it leads to the re-utilization of channels and platforms, which saves time and money.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Informatica PowerExchange support is seen as knowledgeable but receives mixed reviews due to varying response times and availability.
Sentiment score
5.2
Users rely on community support over customer service due to mixed experiences, despite responsive technical support and Hitachi's involvement.
Their support aligns with what I have experienced with Informatica data quality teams, and it is quite effective.
Informatica's technical support team is very supportive and provides help whenever required.
The support was good enough, and they were able to resolve all the issues I raised in the past.
Communication with the vendor is challenging
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.0
Informatica PowerExchange offers robust scalability for diverse sources and transformations, suitable for medium to large data environments.
Sentiment score
7.3
Pentaho excels in scalability and efficient data handling but faces challenges with exceptionally large data and complex growth scenarios.
Pentaho Data Integration handles larger datasets better.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Informatica PowerExchange is praised for stability despite some issues with resource load, visibility, and log maintenance in newer versions.
Sentiment score
7.1
Pentaho Data Integration offers reliability for small to midsize operations but may lag and freeze with complex uses.
Technical errors sometimes occur, such as network breakages at the source level, which breaks connectivity.
It's pretty stable, however, it struggles when dealing with smaller amounts of data.
 

Room For Improvement

Informatica PowerExchange needs better integration, user-friendliness, real-time processing, cloud features, and affordability while addressing performance and support challenges.
Pentaho needs improvements in big data performance, error handling, UI, scheduling, backward compatibility, cloud integration, and Python support.
The addition of data quality dashboards or measures would also help in profiling data to assess its health before sharing or moving it.
One area that could be improved is performance, as PowerExchange sometimes has less performance compared to native connectors when dealing with a huge volume of data.
Pentaho Data Integration is very friendly, it is not very useful when there isn't a lot of data to handle.
 

Setup Cost

Informatica PowerExchange pricing depends on capacity, with variable costs based on usage, but offers moderate cost-efficiency.
Pentaho offers a cost-effective solution with its free Community Edition and affordable subscription-based Enterprise Edition for varying needs.
Informatica PowerExchange is considered cost-efficient due to reduced number of APIs needed.
The pricing and cost depend heavily on SAP's licensing structure, especially if using SAP integration services.
 

Valuable Features

Informatica PowerExchange is lauded for versatile data integration, real-time capabilities, scalability, and support for diverse data sources and formats.
Pentaho provides an intuitive, open-source platform for efficient ETL development and data integration with minimal coding and broad compatibility.
It also reduces the number of APIs needed for new integrations by offering a unified exchange platform.
The primary advantage of Informatica PowerExchange is being able to extract data from source systems that Informatica does not natively support.
PowerExchange is one of the best software solutions to build integrations with non-Oracle or standard database services, especially for SAP and Hana products.
It's easy to use and friendly, especially for larger data sets.
 

Categories and Ranking

Informatica PowerExchange
Ranking in Data Integration
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Pentaho Data Integration an...
Ranking in Data Integration
22nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Informatica PowerExchange is 1.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammad Faizan Ahmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Helpful in handling areas like complex data sources and data processing but needs improved support services
The major challenge with the tool stems from the fact that if you are implementing it in the cloud, then it has to be within the framework. Another challenge is the large volume of data. Informatica PowerExchange is a product through which we enable connectivity, so it is not an application product or a stand-alone tool, but Informatica's core systems or IICS uses it to connect to multiple systems. The major challenge associated with the tool is on the infrastructure side. The tool's features could be something faster with more connectors. A number of connectors can help connect to a wide variety of applications. The tool should focus on reducing the resilient time, like, if any network disconnectivity happens, then auto-reconnection and the retry method should be more robust so that manual intervention is not required. We communicate with the tool's support team as we need to raise our issues with them. I have already worked with Informatica and have a total experience of around eight to nine years; the one problem with the tool is its support team since they take a lot of time to address a particular issue. If one time you schedule a call and explain the situation to them about the issue, the support team will raise tickets and take notes. They will ask you to share the logs or screenshots of the errors, and you will get no resolution. The support team will randomly give you some documents and expect you to go through them, and if you get back to them with questions, a new person will be allocated, and you will have to start explaining everything again. I would not say it is a pleasant experience.
Ryan Ferdon - PeerSpot reviewer
Low-code makes development faster than with Python, but there were caching issues
If you're working with a larger data set, I'm not so sure it would be the best solution. The larger things got the slower it was. It was kind of buggy sometimes. And when we ran the flow, it didn't go from a perceived start to end, node by node. Everything kicked off at once. That meant there were times when it would get ahead of itself and a job would fail. That was not because the job was wrong, but because Pentaho decided to go at everything at once, and something would process before it was supposed to. There were nodes you could add to make sure that, before this node kicks off, all these others have processed, but it was a bit tedious. There were also caching issues, and we had to write code to clear the cache every time we opened the program, because the cache would fill up and it wouldn't run. I don't know how hard that would be for them to fix, or if it was fixed in version 10. Also, the UI is a bit outdated, but I'm more of a fan of function over how something looks. One other thing that would have helped with Pentaho was documentation and support on the internet: how to do things, how to set up. I think there are some sites on how to install it, and Pentaho does have a help repository, but it wasn't always the most useful.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Informatica PowerExchange?
The pricing and cost depend heavily on SAP's licensing structure, especially if using SAP integration services. Informatica is seen as broader in integrations.
What needs improvement with Informatica PowerExchange?
One area that could be improved is performance, as PowerExchange sometimes has less performance compared to native connectors when dealing with a huge volume of data. Additionally, the tool faces t...
Which ETL tool would you recommend to populate data from OLTP to OLAP?
Hi Rajneesh, yes here is the feature comparison between the community and enterprise edition : https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/pdf/brochure/leverage-open-source-benefits-with-assurance-of-hita...
What do you think can be improved with Hitachi Lumada Data Integrations?
In my opinion, the reporting side of this tool needs serious improvements. In my previous company, we worked with Hitachi Lumada Data Integration and while it does a good job for what it’s worth, ...
What do you use Hitachi Lumada Data Integrations for most frequently?
My company has used this product to transform data from databases, CSV files, and flat files. It really does a good job. We were most satisfied with the results in terms of how many people could us...
 

Also Known As

PowerExchange, Connectors
Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ACH Food, BNSF Railway Company, Illinois State University
66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Find out what your peers are saying about Informatica PowerExchange vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.