We performed a comparison between IBM InfoSphere DataStage and Informatica PowerCenter 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."It is quite useful and powerful."
"It's a robust solution."
"When we have needed help from the IBM team, they were helpful. Our company is a premium partner so we get fast responses."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the product's versatility to inject data."
"The most valuable feature for our data processing needs is IBM InfoSphere DataStage's capability to handle ETL tasks with large record volumes."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"The product is a stable and powerful data management solution that can run in parallel mode for enhanced speed."
"The most valuable features of Informatica PowerCenter are the ease of use, and development, and is simple to find resources."
"The most valuable feature is the new Data Lake feature, which provides the basic capabilities needed."
"Good interface, reasonable documentation."
"The ability to scale through partitions helped us to improve the performance."
"The performance and design of Informatica have been very valuable. I find the performance faster than, say, Oracle Data Integrator or DataStage."
"The greatest feature is that it is very easy to have someone come in and jump right in. It is one of the nicest tools in terms of getting a person acquainted quickly."
"It works with any multi-databases, so it works with Sybase, SQL Server. Also, the performance is really good and it is easy to use."
"The solution is stable."
"The interface needs improvement."
"The setup is extremely difficult."
"There could be more customization options for the product."
"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."
"So, there are some features that are missing. If I compare DataStage to Talend, Talend allows you to write custom code in Java or use these tools in your applications as well if you are building a job application. But in DataStage, it does not allow you to write custom code for any component."
"Working with some of the big data components is good, but I can see improvements are needed."
"The initial setup can be complex."
"Currently lacking virtualization ability."
"This solution needs the functionality to do batch processing of data. It also lacks connectivity to NoSQL, unstructured data sources."
"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."
"The only problem with this product is the level of complexity with the number of levels of transformation that you have to go through."
"The price of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required, considering the fact that the present licensing charges of the tool are expensive."
"Areas for improvement in Informatica PowerCenter include scalability and high availability or the clustering configuration because that's still very basic. The elasticity or scaling of the platform needs a lot of improvement. For example, when it comes to DR handling or building an active-active or active-passive cluster, Informatica PowerCenter is still not that powerful. Automation also needs improvement in the solution. Improving automation leads to some improvement in the stability of Informatica PowerCenter and other aspects related to it. What I'd like to see in the next release of Informatica PowerCenter is real-time capability because the solution is mainly for patches, and to have real-time integration, you need to count on some additional components from Informatica. I would expect more integration and a complete platform in terms of real-time capability or patching with minimal interventions or minimal components to be aligned together."
"I would like to see improvements made to the custom transformations. It should be more open for users that want to write their own code and use cases."
"The solution's commercial cost is very high. Other open-source tools can do the tool's functions for free. The world is moving to the cloud, but the solution hasn't updated its drivers. I presume that its downfall will start soon. The tool is trying to cross-sell or upsell without helping customers derive benefits from the existing products. They have multiple tools and licenses. It is better to bring the smaller tools in one umbrella."
"We had to take on a large volume of data from the legacy Sybase system. This was taking a very long time, i.e., more than a day. We were trying to improve it with partitions to gpload, but we were told that we can't go more than four partitions."
IBM InfoSphere DataStage is ranked 7th in Data Integration with 37 reviews while Informatica PowerCenter is ranked 3rd in Data Integration with 78 reviews. IBM InfoSphere DataStage is rated 7.8, while Informatica PowerCenter is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM InfoSphere DataStage writes "User-friendly with a lot of functions for transmission rules, but has slow performance and not suitable for a huge volume of data". On the other hand, 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". IBM InfoSphere DataStage is most compared with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, SSIS, Azure Data Factory, Talend Open Studio and IBM InfoSphere Information Server, whereas Informatica PowerCenter is most compared with Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Azure Data Factory, SSIS, Databricks and Talend Open Studio. See our IBM InfoSphere DataStage vs. Informatica PowerCenter report.
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My experience with these products is telling me that:
- Informatica is much more flexible, it has more points, where different types of codding and tuning are available. If the landscape is heterogeneous and complex - it’s the right choice. On the other hand, it works more slowly.
- IBM DS is very strong in code efficiency and flows parallelism. If the landscape is IBM-oriented or not so complex, but data volumes are huge - it’s the right choice. On the other hand, coding and tuning abilities are more ascetic.
- Informatica needs dedicated admin in the project team, IBM DS - does not.
- Informatica has an evolving cloud version, IBM DS hasn’t yet.
- Informatica is not proper working with Hadoop, IBM DS is.
The pricing of both is more or less equal.