We performed a comparison between Informatica Powercenter and SSIS based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Informatica PowerCenter is a more advanced option if you can afford the higher price. However, SSIS scored better in terms of ease of deployment and service and support.
"If the systems get migrated or upgraded, the amount of resources required are very minimal. We can change the connections and establish a new connection. It's very helpful."
"To me, what's most valuable in Informatica PowerCenter is the flexibility in building the integration pipeline. Usually, you need to have a platform to be able to integrate with different technologies, including legacy data such as the mainframe. The platform should also be rich enough to transform the data per your business requirement, with no restrictions. Rich integration and rich transformation capabilities are the two key capabilities in Informatica PowerCenter. The solution also offers ease of use. Another valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the drag-and-drop integration because it's GUI-based, similar to IBM and Oracle."
"The reliability of the product and the way of orchestration of different services is valuable to us."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"Enterprise-scale ETL solution that's very stable and is easy to scale. It integrates and connects with multiple new systems, both structured and semi-structured."
"It has helped us monetize."
"It has a Data Catalog that uses the Model repository."
"Informatica PowerCenter is very good for integrating a huge amount of data in a very short duration, such as a minute. It is also very easy to use. After you provide the source and the target, mappings are automatically done, which makes it easy to use for the development team."
"The scalability of SSIS is good."
"The most valuable feature of SSIS is its ease of use. It is easier to use than other applications."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the fast insert and fuzzy logic matching."
"It is also easy to learn and user-friendly. Microsoft is also good in terms of technical support. They have built a large community all over the world."
"The most important features are it works well and provides self-service BI."
"The performance and stability are good."
"It's a competent product."
"The initial setup was easy."
"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."
"While on-premises is a better product, we really need to move to the cloud and need the cloud to be as robust as this product."
"In the future, I would like to see Informatica PowerCenter integrate a more powerful dashboard."
"Support could be better."
"Informatica PowerCenter could improve by having a single interface because half of the system is still in the legacy interface and many other elements are moved to the developer client. It would be good if there was a single interface for the end user and developers."
"Integrated Reporting service should be more smoothly transitioned from view to function to be in sync with the main design."
"As a connector to big data, it is not well developed. We've had problems connecting Informatica with Hadoop. The functionality to connect Informatica with Hadoop, for me it's not good."
"The solution could have better documentation on basic steps or blocks that specify what to do."
"SSIS is cumbersome despite its drag-and-drop functionality. For example, let's say I have 50 tables with 30 columns. You need to set a data type for each column and table. That's around 1,500 objects. It gets unwieldy adding validation for every column. Previously, SSIS automatically detected the data type, but I think they removed this feature. It would automatically detect if it's an integer, primary key, or foreign key column. You had fewer problems building the model."
"We have a stability problem because when something works, it works one time. The next time, it doesn't work."
"It hangs a lot of the time."
"I would like to see more standard components out of the box, such as SFTP, and Data Compression components."
"When I compare Talend and SSIS, Talend provides more features. With Talend, we can handle a large volume of data. Talend is usually used to treat a large volume of data, which makes it better than SSIS on the data side. Talend also has a very good Talend Management Console to schedule the jobs and do other things. It can also be easily connected to version control tools such as GitHub or SVN. The last time I used SSIS, it was connected through TSS for the Windows Console version. I am not sure it has been improved or not. If it is not improved, Microsoft should improve it. They should change the product to provide another console."
"The high prices attached to the product can be an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The solution could improve by having quicker release updates."
"The creation of the measure in the DAC's model could be improved."
Informatica PowerCenter is ranked 3rd in Data Integration with 78 reviews while SSIS is ranked 2nd in Data Integration with 69 reviews. Informatica PowerCenter is rated 8.0, while SSIS is rated 7.6. 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 SSIS writes "Maintaining the solution and contacting its support team is easy". Informatica PowerCenter is most compared with Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Azure Data Factory, Databricks, AWS Glue and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), whereas SSIS is most compared with Talend Open Studio, IBM InfoSphere DataStage, Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), AWS Glue and Azure Data Factory. See our Informatica PowerCenter vs. SSIS report.
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Curious why you would compare these 2 tools and why you wouldn't be looking for a PaaS solution?
SSIS is free verses Informatica is the opposite. But there are no plans to fully embrace SSIS within Azure. They have moved to ADF and Synapse pipelines.
That said there is IR (Integration Runtime) so you can run SSIS in Azure but it's limited in terms of SSIS add-ons. Clearly, the future for Microsoft is Azure and Synapse so don't count on SSIS staying around for many more years.
In fact, the BiXpress add-on has been deprecated by its new owner. And I would NOT recommend using SSIS without BiXpress as its built-in logging and error control is awful.
I'm looking at us migrating from SSIS to ADF over the next few years.
SSIS PowerPack is a group of drag and drop connectors for Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services, commonly called SSIS. The collection helps organizations boost productivity with code-free components and connect cloud and on-premises data sources. We find it very useful for connecting traditional data sources, big data, and NoSQL.
We like that it can carry out simple and complex transformations. It is easy to use and helps us connect with multiple systems and web services. It makes it really easy for developers to develop production SSIS packages. It helps us to pull data because it is DBA-friendly.
However, the filtering of the tasks is a bit difficult, and the error messages can be confusing and hard to resolve.
That’s why, when evaluating both solutions, we ultimately decided to go with Informatica PowerCenter. This metadata-driven integration tool is easy to use and effective even when creating complex mapping. It is easy to monitor jobs, create workflows, and detect bugs. It is well suited for handling a low volume of records, therefore maintaining a real-time operation at an affordable cost.
Another advantage is that it works with ETL-type data integration, connecting to almost all types of database systems. It has great support and documentation, too. Informatica PowerCenter can address different data quality issues, such as data masking and virtualization. It has supporting tools for big data as well. It is critical to ensure we can feed on multiple data streams and transform them into usable data in the data warehouse.
There are a few downsides, though. There aren’t many scheduling options, and debugging the workflows is kind of hard.
Conclusions:
Overall, SSIS is a very good group of tools. For organizations used to working with MS products, it provides easy integration and connections between databases. Since we work with a small number of records, the Informatica PowerCenter works better for us.