Talend Open Studio Reviews

We have used the solution for a real estate agency in Singapore to stream their data on a more or less real-time basis to a mobile app. Their backend system is primarily built on SAP. They used a combination of Kafka message querying and Talend to stream the data into a NoSQL environment, which is MongoDB. The solution basically streams the data from SAP backend systems, all the way to a NoSQL MongoDB database, to support a real-time or near real-time data flow into a mobile app. 

This mobile app will be a consumer-facing app. The end consumers will be able to look at the status of their real estate space. Users are mostly the tenants who either rent or lease commercial or residential spaces. The status of their leased property will be made available via a mobile app. The data solution comprised of technology such as Kafka for message queuing, Talend for data flow streaming, and MongoDB for storing the data. That's one use case.

The second problem solved using Talend is to build the data lake for internal data analytics at a government organization, again based in Singapore. Their backend systems are primarily supported by Sybase databases. From the Sybase databases, selective data is brought into a staging area via Qlik Attunity, which is a real-time data synchronization tool that uses the change data capture mechanism. Once the data comes to the staging environment through Attunity, then Talend takes over. Talend pulls that data and moves it to Cloudera's big data solution, the big data platform. Then, Tableau is used for data analytics and data visualization. This solution is set up for internal data analytics within the government organization.

The tool offered essential connectors to connect to various data sources and our big data platform. Our data sources were SAP/ MS SQL and Sybase. The Hadoop/ hive connectors are used to connect to the Cloudera-based big data platform. The components available to loop and dynamically pass source/target connections helped us to stream data based on source tables' metadata. This helps us to onboard new data sources quickly, rather than building a custom data pipeline for each new data source.

The main differentiator that I have seen between Talend and other data integration tools is the ability to view the data pipeline in the form of a program/ code. The other tools hide the backend code behind the scene, however, Talend shows the backend code that gets generated from the UI (user interface) components used for creating a data pipeline. I.e., In most of the data integration tools, all we do is, leverage certain UI components meant for data processing such as reading, selection, filtering, sorting, writing et cetera to build data pipelines. The tools such as Pentaho or Informatica, will convert the pipeline into a backend code, which is written probably in C++ or java program. This is not transparent to the developer or the programmer. But in the case of Talend, the tool converts the pipeline into a programmatic format and shows it to the user. This helps in debugging errors. 

If somebody has a passion and interest in software programming, they will like this feature. Of course, we can do without it, however, this additional feature available in Talend helps the data engineer to understand the code better, understand how to better tune for performance, and so on. The differentiation is the ability to view the data pipeline in the form of a traditional software program.

Comparing the plus and minus of other tools and will try and suggest what can be improved in Talend based on how other tools implemented certain features. 

Both Talend and Pentaho leverage open-source plugins. There are lots of open-source committees that build solutions as per their requirement;  Say, for example, someone may have had a need to create a Tableau data extract from a certain database for the purpose of data visualization in Tableau. They may have created a plugin for this purpose and shared it with the market. We can always go into the market and search for a plugin that someone else created (for ex., to generate TDE files) when we have similar needs. Both Talend and Pentaho offer the 3rd party plugins in their market. This plugin market feature automatically extends/improves the tool capability. If somebody needs a particular feature, they can always build one and publish it for the other developers to use. 

Other than this, maybe if Talend had a few components, it's easier to deploy solutions; job scheduling is one. Currently, the job scheduler is a separate component within Nexus and is accessible over browser. It can be integrated within TOS (Talend Open Studio) so that we dont need to switch between the two. Nexus holds the repository of compiled program code. However, Nexus doesn't have the ability to keep the repository of the source code programs. That can be improved. 

Currently, Talend has a versioning feature, meaning the previous version can be named as 0.1 or 1.0 and the subsequent minor/major versions can be increased with incremental version numbers, however, it is not that great as a version control repository (such as VSS, CVS, Git, etc). If a Nexus-like tool can be used for maintaining versions of the underlying source code (not just for the compiled code), that would be great. Basically, version control can be improved.

I've been using the solution since 2019.

The stability of the solution is mainly based on the server architecture behind the scenes. We have seen some instability issues on other tools around the Talend platform. For ex., Qlik Attunity had been throwing some exceptions every now and then, however, in the case of Talend, we haven't seen many. At times the server would run out of memory. Based on the capacity we have, we may have to go and clean up a few logs and other systems’ data before resuming the processes manually. 

The system's stability is okay, especially in the case of our data warehouse. Users do understand that a data warehouse is less critical when compared to operational systems. The users' reports are normally generated at the end of the day for their availability, the next day. We have a workable level of stability, which is good enough. We don't see any instability issues.

Talend operates on a clustered job server setup, available in both Linux & windows. The clusters can be scaled up with additional nodes as per demand. In the case of an on-premise setup, we assess the load and define clusters based on the load. We did not have auto-scaling.

Talend has a support portal and we can get access to the support portal. The initial process could be a little difficult, to get into the support. The initial access provisioning could be improved. It took about a week's time to get a support login created. Once that is done, then you will get quality answers to the support questions.

There are two ways to get technical support, either from the dedicated support team from Talend, or from the open-source community. The dedicated team provides an answer for sure, however, we may not get answers to all our questions from the open-source forums.

Neutral

We are aware of the other solutions such as Pentaho. But, there was no switching. For most of the customers, I do the evaluation of tools, over one to two months and then finalize on one particular tool. They don't really move around from one ETL tool to another ETL tool, unless the tool itself is getting obsolete or if it is no longer supported. In the case of Talend, from what I have seen, there is no switching. They must have initially evaluated a few tools and finalized with one. The main reason could be that Talend supports a big data environment. Talend has the ability to integrate with market solutions. Third-party integration is possible. Talend is also becoming popular in Southeast Asia, so skilled resources are readily available in the market if we need people to maintain the environment. Those could be some of the factors that influence the selection of Talend.

Initial setup requires a systems engineer, who has knowledge in Linux/ Windows OS, depending on the server type, to work with Talend support. It takes about 2-3 weeks for the basic setup. For additional plugins/ components, guidance from Talend support team is required.

After the initial setup, most of the ETL data pipelines take about a week at the minimum to build. Typically, we reap the benefits after a month or two from a particular data stream. Of course, it is based on the different use cases and depends on the number of data pipelines involved in solving that particular use case, however, smaller scoped items can be delivered in one to three months' time. 

After development and testing, the time required for the deployment varies, depending on the process we adopt and depending on the version control tools that we have as well. Certain tools will easily integrate into the Talend environment. In those cases, I mean, it would be a medium-complexity deployment. We can't say it's very simple, we can't say it's too complex either. There is a medium level of difficulty involved in deployment.

The time it takes depends on the processes a particular organization follows in terms of change management and deployment. Some will require at least one week of review with the change management board. In certain organizations, the approval processes may take up to three weeks to get something deployed. If the process is a little simpler, if the developer has a fair level of control, it could be just one week.

A vendor team was in charge of the server maintenance and their scope of service included deployment as well, as developers do not have access to production networks in established firms. Developers normally provide a step by step instructions in a word document that the vendor team will follow. Some familiarity with the tool is enough, but the vendor personnel we worked with had the reasonable experience to an extent where they recommended code improvements. 

Typically before embarking on a project, we analyze the return on investment, which could be over two to three years. It could be as quick as three months, depending on the scope of the data integration project, however, in the case of a data warehousing solution, it could be two to three years. 

The real estate company we worked with, must have already seen the return on investment. Their mobile apps should be live with the data integrated at the backend. 

For the internal data analytics use case, they would've also seen the benefits, as the data is already available in the data lake. The users will be able to do the analysis with the integrated data pool in the data lake. 

Both the companies have seen the returns.

Pricing is competitive in comparison with Pentaho. Both are at par. Solutions such as Informatica could be more expensive. Certain packaged solutions that use Talend as ETL may be available, if you are looking for a pre-built data warehouse model.

Yes, Apache NiFi was evaluated. Based on the POC (proof of concept) results, we chose Talend.

Some of my comments are based on my limited understanding of the tool. Please do due diligence before selecting the tool. I recommend a POC over 1-2 months on shortlisted tools, before finalizing one.

The best thing I have found with Talend Open Studio is their major support for the lookups. With Salesforce, when we want to relate our child objects to their parent object, we need to create them via IDs. Then the upsert operation, which will allow you to relate a child object to the event, will have an external ID. That is the best thing which keeps it very sorted. I like that.

In terms of what can be improved, the scheduling is not there in the sister version, while it is there in the cloud one, which is a paid version. If all kinds of scheduling could be available on the Open Studio that we generally use and practice on, that would be great. The scheduling of the data migration is currently not available in the sister version of Talend Open Studio that we are working on. It is available in the advanced version of the Talend. This is the one thing that can be improvised.

Overall, I would like to see better scheduling for multiple, simultaneously running processes.

I have been using Talend Open Studio for almost five plus years.

The stability is good. Since I have worked on a quite number of ETLs, Talend is a better approach or at least the better choice for me. Every time, it is the better choice to go for.

Scalability is a good feature here.

Whether we increase usage depends on the requirements. When I started, it was the basic requirement. Now, as time passes, I'm working on competencies and the new personalities of the Talend and there are some components which are not available here which I have to download from the AppExchange. For example, there is a kind of drill component which we get from AppExchange. With the experience of five years, I have worked multiple competencies and multiple scenarios. It is scalable and customizable, but one issue we have faced individually and as a team on Talend, is the errors which are not completely recognizable. Other than that, in terms of handling, in terms customization, in terms of the UI, it is quite responsive and quite easy to use. Other than the logs.

I have used cloud apps, such as the dataloader.io or the Informatica cloud, but I have not worked on the Talend cloud version. I now work on the Talend Open Studio, which is the desktop version.

When I started this data thing, where we handle the data, Talend Open Studio was the first solution which I worked on and I'm still working on it. I have worked on the different details of the scheduling events and of the client comments. These are the two issues because of which I switched to Informatica, the DataBank, and cloud dataloader. Otherwise, we mostly focus on Talend Open Studio.

Initial setup was not very easy because when I started I didn't have any background on the data integration. But there is a class to start. When I started with Talend Open Studio, it was an average, good experience. Not very easy, nor very complicated.

I would say it is a good platform. Give it a start to work on. It actually handles the freshers very nicely. The only drawback as a fresher is lacking the experience which makes it difficult to understand the error message that gets generated on the execution of the job, not in the file. That has been tricky. Because you need to have experience to understand why that error appears in the execution of the job. Otherwise, it's a good platform to have a start on.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Talend Open Studio an 8 to 9. It would be 9 if they added the scheduling of multiple processes. Without that, it is an 8.

I use the open-source version of this solution. It's data integration-related. Right now, I'm doing some legacy TL into a new enterprise data repository.

When the tool has an error, the error-handling is not that user-friendly. It might just be my inexperience with the tool, but I struggle a lot with finding my layers sometimes. I think my biggest problem with the tool is that the errors are very hard to debug.

Our special need is geospatial data, so that could be included as part of the tool and not only as an add-on. It's always hard to do add-ons and tools when it's a third party, and every time there's going to be an upgrade, you don't know if it will keep working. It would be great if they were included as part of the main tool, like FME. That would be my main concern about the Talend tool right now.

I have been using this solution for about a month. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution has add-ons that you can add. I'm dealing with geospatial data, and you have to have add-ons to do that, but I haven't gotten a chance to add them yet. The first add-on I tried didn't work, but I think it might just be outdated and not compatible with the version of the product that I have.

There are two of us using this solution, my colleague and myself, but in the next month or so we are going to get the Professional version in a private cloud environment. We're exploring the tool to decide if it's going to become our tool of choice for the data repository and data warehouse. Right now, we're working locally with the open-source version of it, but we're trying to decide if Talend is the right tool for us and in order to do that, we want to have the proper version of Talend in the proper environment and then do all the tests.

FME has been used for a long time at my company, strictly for managing geospatial data. Now, we're creating an enterprise repository, and we need to deal with the regular data plus the geospatial data together, so we're trying to find a tool that will be able to handle both of these types of data, and manage all of the enterprise requirements that we have. We have used solutions like FME, but I don't believe there was any other tool that was used on the scale that we're trying to use Talend now.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I didn't have many problems installing it. It seemed very straightforward to me. 

Deployment can take a few hours, depending on your environment, because it requires some things that you may need to install if you're missing them. I think it took me probably under an hour to do it.

I did the deployment myself on my local workstation. 

Right now, because we're using the open-source version, there's no cost. However, down the road when we use the Professional version, there will be costs. I don't know what the cost will be because I'm not involved in that, but I know that there is a license at that point.

I would rate this solution as a seven out of ten. 

The ease to use is great. You've got a lot of functionalities in there. The kind of connectors that you have within Talend is actually quite good. If you look at Talend, it has got more than 900 plus connectors that you can work with. You basically can work with a variety of data sources. There's no limit to it. That is one of the key benefits of Talend.

The initial setup is easy.

The solution is stable.

It's a scalable product.

Technical support is helpful.

It is user-friendly and the interface is good. 

The integration capabilities have been fine. 

Nothing comes to mind in terms of areas of improvement. 

Multiple products are there within the product suite. That can be actually trimmed down. Instead of having multiple products, what they can do is they can have a smaller set of products. That would be better.

You need a Java virtual machine, version 11. Anything below that is not going to work.

Technical support could answer queries a bit faster. 

I just installed the solution two or three weeks ago. 

The stability is very good. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. The reliability is good.

It can scale as needed. That's not a problem.

We have four or five users using the solution in our company. They are developers. 

Technical support has been quite good. We are very happy with them so far.

Of course, they could always be more responsive.  

Positive

It's quite simple to set up. It's all about the installation. Just you need to click on the main file, and then it's just next, next, next. That's it. The one thing that you need to make sure of is that you have a JVM of version 11. It's just a standard installation. However, after that, the main thing that you need to make sure of is that you have a Java virtual machine, version 11. Anything below that will not work.

The pricing is reasonable. 

I'd rate the pricing on offer a five out of five. they make it very affordable. 

We also looked at Informatica. That is one of the leading platforms in the data integration space. Both solutions have got the same capabilities, however, the good thing about Talend is that is the cost. It's a bit cheaper.

The solution is deployed on my personal laptop.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The solution can be deployed on the cloud and on-premise.

The most valuable features of Talend Open Studio are customization and integration.

Talend Open Studio has a lot of capabilities, but there is some restriction. For example, if we want to connect to an SAP system, Open Studio cannot do it. We need to go with an enterprise version. Additionally, the monitoring features could improve.

In the next release of the solution, there should be some sort of reporting. If you compare Open Studio with the enterprise version, the enterprise is giving us the usage reports, a lot of in-built reports are available. That feature is not available in the open-source, which can be increased. However, that's not a major show stopper or a concern, but it would be nice to have those features.

I have been using Talend Open Studio for approximately eight years.

Talend Open Studio is stable.

We did some testing with the enterprise version and we did not encounter any problems with the scalability of the solution. There are scalable features available. However, the documentation could be better.

Talend Open Studio needs to improve on its documentation and support.

The initial setup of Talend Open Studio was straightforward for Windows. However, when it comes to Linux, it is a bit complicated but it's manageable.

The implementation of Talend Open Studio was done in-house.

Talend Open Studio is priced too high.

The cost involved is high, we need to select which solution to use, the Open Studio version or the enterprise version. If there is scope for SAP or some paid connectors, we can go with the enterprise version, or the Open Studio version is capable enough to manage the data integration part.

I rate Talend Open Studio an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is for data migration and validations.

This solution has helped our organization by allowing us to query from different sources and transform and send it to APIs through API calls.

The most valuable feature for me when it comes to this solution is that it's easy to use.

I would say that writing to JSON is kind of a pain. It reads from a JSON file pretty well, but writing to a JSON file is not so great because its components are not good. I would say this is the most important.

I have been using this solution for about six months.

I would rate the stability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the scalability of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. There are around seven or eight users of this solution in our company. Eventually, we plan to scale to 20 people.

I would rate the technical support of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Positive

I would say that the initial setup was medium-difficult.

I would recommend other people looking into this solution to pay attention to the learning curve and the documentation, which is the solution's strong suit. The Talend academy is a good place to start.

I would rate this solution as a whole a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I am using Talend Open Studio for ETL. I extra data from APIs and transform it for the data warehouse.

The most valuable feature of Talend Open Studio is the tMap component. There is a lot of functionality in one component.

The stability of the solution could improve when running jobs. There can be errors when running projects but in the end, it works well and the errors do not impact the result.

I have been using Talend Open Studio for approximately one month.

There are times in our usage when the solution crashes. When we are running jobs that are more than one or two it can crash or not work well.

I rate the stability of Talend Open Studio a five out of ten.

We have approximately eight people using this solution in my company.

The solution is scalable.

I have used Informatica before Talend Open Studio and when comparing the two, the interface is more intuitive in Talend Open Studio.

The setup of Talend Open Studio is simple. The process took approximately two hours and it was my first experience.

I rate the initial setup of Talend Open Studio a ten out of ten.

I implemented the solution.

I am using the open-source version and it is free.

The solution does not require any maintenance.

I recommend this solution to beginners. It is free and the interface is intuitive and has a lot of helpful components.

I rate Talend Open Studio an eight out of ten.

We have migrated to the Talend Open Studio version 7.3. but have not used it yet. I have only done some testing on another computer to see how the new version is functioning.

We use Talend Open Studio only to do the ETL from our database, it takes XML files and converts them to CSV. Talend Open Studio transforms files on the website and modifies them for the database.

Talend Open Studio is easy to create jobs. We use the basic functionality and it is very good.

There is a lot of aspect of Talend Open Studio that should be improved.

We need more components to be more efficient. We use a lot of components, such as Salesforce, and it's not easy to use. There's are minor bugs and it's not easy to use some of the features. 

Talend Open Studio takes a lot of memory to use, we want to be careful because it needs memory.

I have been using Talend Open Studio for approximately four years.

Talend Open Studio is a very stable solution.

I have not used the support from Talend Open Studio.

The deployment of Talend Open Studio is straightforward.

We used a consultant to do the implementation of the solution.

I rate Talend Open Studio a seven out of ten.