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."The most valuable features are the dynamic reading of the file metadata profile, and the ability to define business rules that are used to verify and validate the uploaded files."
"The most valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the flow designer functionally. It is the best out of any ETL tool. Additionally, the solution is reliable and trustable in dealing with large data sources anytime. When we're using billions of data transactions, it's smooth."
"Informatica PowerCenter is a very good ETL tool."
"We can scale the product."
"It is UI friendly and has all the advantages of an ETL tool."
"The ability to scale through partitions helped us to improve the performance."
"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."
"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."
"It's very easy to integrate. It integrates with Snowflake, AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. It's very helpful for DevOps, DataOps, and data engineering because it provides a comprehensive solution, and it's not complicated."
"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."
"Important features include that it comprises lots of functionality to connect data from various sources through connector availability, scheduling pipelines at any time, and integration with third-party and security solutions for encryption."
"The best feature that I really like is the integration."
"The most valuable would be the GUI platform that I saw. I first saw it at a special session that StreamSets provided towards the end of the summer. I saw the way you set it up and how you have different processes going on with your data. The design experience seemed to be pretty straightforward to me in terms of how you drag and drop these nodes and connect them with arrows."
"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."
"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."
"Its licensing can be improved. It should be features-wise and not bundle-wise. A bundle will definitely be costly. In addition, we might use one or two features. That's why the pricing model should be based on the features. The model should be flexible enough based on the features. Their support should also be more responsive to premium customers."
"Now they are migrating to a new version, and they have something that is called Informatica Developer. Previously, they just had PowerCenter. Now, when they move everything to Informatica Developer it's not as good or stable like it was when it was PowerCenter, though it has some nice features. This Developer tool could be better."
"Informatica PowerCenter could improve on the documentation for the implementation. The documents provided are not very good for a new user."
"In terms of performance improvement and tuning, there should be a bit more guidance and documentation."
"The licensing is difficult."
"The performance of Informatica PowerCenter could improve."
"I found it is kind of weird that not all of the mapping changes are treated as true changes."
"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."
"If you use JDBC Lookup, for example, it generally takes a long time to process data."
"We've seen a couple of cases where it appears to have a memory leak or a similar problem."
"The monitoring visualization is not that user-friendly. It should include other features to visualize things, like how many records were streamed from a source to a destination on a particular date."
"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."
"There aren't enough hands-on labs, and debugging is also an issue because it takes a lot of time. Logs are not that clear when you are debugging, and you can only select a single source for a pipeline."
"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."
"The logging mechanism could be improved. If I am working on a pipeline, then create a job out of it and it is running, it will generate constant logs. So, the logging mechanism could be simplified. Now, it is a bit difficult to understand and filter the logs. It takes some time."
"The design experience is the bane of our existence because their documentation is not the best. Even when they update their software, they don't publish the best information on how to update and change your pipeline configuration to make it conform to current best practices. We don't pay for the added support. We use the "freeware version." The user community, as well as the documentation they provide for the standard user, are difficult, at best."
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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