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IBM InfoSphere DataStage pros and cons

Vendor: IBM

3.9 out of 5

42 reviews
83% willing to recommend

1,700 followers

Pros & Cons summary

IBM InfoSphere DataStage is highly customizable for handling scheduled batch and real-time data within the same job. It offers data integration for warehousing and volumetric analysis, optimizing performance via parallel processing. It provides stability, availability, and reliable support. However, it lacks connectors for modern data sources, has poor documentation, and a complex architecture causing outages. Pricing issues and limited cloud and big data support affect its appeal.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

IBM InfoSphere DataStage is highly customizable, allowing handling of multiple data latencies in the same job and offering flexibility in integrating complex business rules.

The ETL tools in IBM InfoSphere DataStage are considered the most valuable feature, enabling complex data transformations and scalability to handle large volumes of data.

IBM InfoSphere DataStage provides robust support for parallel processing, leading to improved speed and performance optimization for large datasets.

IBM InfoSphere DataStage offers excellent debugging capabilities and a wide range of connectors for diverse data integration purposes, including real-time and cloud connectivity.

The scalability and stability of IBM InfoSphere DataStage are notable, with multi-instance support for jobs and high availability across multiple servers.

CONS

IBM InfoSphere DataStage needs better integration with modern data sources like cloud solutions and non-structured data.

Performance improvements are required for handling large data volumes in real-time scenarios.

Documentation and in-application help, particularly for API usage and new features, are inadequate.

Pricing is considered high compared to competitors, affecting customer choice.

IBM InfoSphere DataStage lacks support for cloud migration and modern database connectors.

IBM InfoSphere DataStage Pros review quotes

UF

Ursula Fladeruf

Owner at mip GmbH

Jul 29, 2019

The product is a stable and powerful data management solution that can run in parallel mode for enhanced speed.

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KS

KirillSlivchikov

Owner at 7Spring Consult

Sep 26, 2019

The data lineage report can be filtered for reporting. The reports are user-friendly and take less time to find what you need.

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reviewer1559628

Data/Solution Architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Apr 22, 2021

As a data integration platform, it is easy to use. It is quite robust and useful for volumetric analysis when you have huge volumes of data. We have tested it for up to ten million rows, and it is robust enough to process ten million rows internally with its parallel processing. Its error logging mechanism is far simpler and easier to understand than other data integration tools. The newer version of InfoSphere has the data catalog and IDC lineage. They are helpful in the easy traceability of columns and tables.

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IBM InfoSphere DataStage

Free Report: IBM InfoSphere DataStage Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about IBM InfoSphere DataStage. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

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Senior Data Architect at Anadolu Sigorta

Apr 15, 2024

DataStage has also improved its connectors, such as connectivity with Kafka for real-time data integration, cloud connectors, and others like Spark and HVAC SaaS. All these processes are expected to shift to the cloud in the next five years. It's a very robust tool, much like PowerCenter.

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Tirthankar Roy Chowdhury

Teamlead at Tata consultancy services

Aug 3, 2022

The best feature of IBM InfoSphere DataStage for me was that it was very much user-friendly. The solution didn't require that much raw coding because most of its features were drag and drop, plus it had a large number of functionalities.

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Associate Manager at Ernst & Young

Mar 28, 2024

Compared to other ETL tools, DataStage has excellent debugging and development capabilities. And the availability of connectors, even though we sometimes have to opt for specific ones. Also, the availability of patches is good.

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Technical Lead at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 31, 2019

DataStage works better with Linux operating systems when the application services are hosted on Linux system equipment, but it's powerful on Windows too.

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BB

DataStage at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Mar 5, 2021

We are mostly using transmission rules. It has a lot of functions and logic related to transmission. It is a user-friendly tool with in-built functions.

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Arquitecto Industrial IoT at Xignux SA de CV

Feb 21, 2024

The most valuable feature for our data processing needs is IBM InfoSphere DataStage's capability to handle ETL tasks with large record volumes.

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Manager - Business Technology Solutions at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 23, 2024

The solution is very easy to use.

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IBM InfoSphere DataStage Cons review quotes

UF

Ursula Fladeruf

Owner at mip GmbH

Jul 29, 2019

The interface needs work to be more user-friendly.

Read full review

KS

KirillSlivchikov

Owner at 7Spring Consult

Sep 26, 2019

We would be happy to see in next versions the ability to return several parameters from jobs. Now, jobs can return just one parameter. If they could return several parameters, that would be great.

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reviewer1559628

Data/Solution Architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Apr 22, 2021

Its documentation is not up to the mark. While building APIs, we had a lot of problems trying to get around it because it is not very user-friendly. We tried to get hold of API documentation, but the documentation is not very well thought out. It should be more structured and elaborate. In terms of additional features, I would like to see good reporting on performance and performance-tuning recommendations that can be based on AI. I would also like to see better data profiling information being reported on InfoSphere.

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IBM InfoSphere DataStage

Free Report: IBM InfoSphere DataStage Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about IBM InfoSphere DataStage. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

851,451 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Senior Data Architect at Anadolu Sigorta

Apr 15, 2024

The deployment could be more straightforward.

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Tirthankar Roy Chowdhury

Teamlead at Tata consultancy services

Aug 3, 2022

What needs improvement in IBM InfoSphere DataStage is its pricing. The pricing for the solution is higher than its competitors, so a lot of the clients my company has worked with prefer other tools over IBM InfoSphere DataStage because of the high price tag. Another area for improvement in the solution stems from a lot of new types of databases, for example, databases in the cloud and big data have become available, and IBM InfoSphere DataStage is working on various connectors for different data sources, but that still isn't up-to-date, meaning that some connectors are missing for modern data sources. The latest version of IBM InfoSphere DataStage also has a complex architecture, so my team faced frequent outages and that should be improved as well.

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Associate Manager at Ernst & Young

Mar 28, 2024

In terms of intermediate storage, we have some challenges, especially with customers who store data in intermediate locations.

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Technical Lead at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 31, 2019

I really like this tool, but the administration should be on the same client application because a lot of administration features are not on the client-side, and they usually need to have administrative access. It's quite complicated to force IT teams to have separate administrative access from the developers.

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BB

DataStage at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Mar 5, 2021

It doesn't have any big data connections. It would be good to have them because most of the systems are moving towards big data. There should also be a user-friendly way to interact with the cloud. Its loading process is very slow. It takes a lot of time for around 5 or 6 million records, and we are not able to provide real-time data to the vendors due to this delay. Its performance needs to be improved. It is also like a legacy system. It is not updated much. In higher versions, they only do small changes. We would like to have new features and new technologies.

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Arquitecto Industrial IoT at Xignux SA de CV

Feb 21, 2024

Improvements for DataStage could include better integration with modern data sources like cloud solutions and documents, along with enhancing its capability to handle non-structured data.

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Manager - Business Technology Solutions at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 23, 2024

The troubleshooting guide is very bad.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 40)

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Data Integration

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Data Integration

Popular Comparisons

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Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs IBM InfoSphere DataStage

Azure Data Factory vs IBM InfoSphere DataStage

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Talend Open Studio vs IBM InfoSphere DataStage

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