AWS Glue vs Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services comparison

The compared Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Informatica solutions aren't in the same category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #1 in CDI , with an average rating of 7.6, and holds a 21.3% mindshare in the category. Informatica is ranked #12 in PaaS , with an average rating of 8.4, and holds a 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Informatica users who would recommend it.

AWS Glue

Read 48 AWS Glue reviews

7,339 Views
5,504 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Informatica Intelligent Clo...

Read 7 Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services reviews

432 Views
78 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

AWS Glue

Informatica Intelligent Clo...

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between AWS Glue and Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Web Services (AWS), Informatica, Salesforce and others in Cloud Data Integration.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Data Integration Report (Updated: March 2025).

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Cloud Data Integration

March 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

AWS Glue

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Data Integration (1st)

Informatica Intelligent Clo...

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) (12th)

Mindshare comparison

AWS Glue and Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. AWS Glue is designed for Cloud Data Integration and holds a mindshare of 21.3%, down 21.7% compared to last year.
Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, on the other hand, focuses on Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), holds 0.6% mindshare, up 0.4% since last year.

Cloud Data Integration

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)

Featured Reviews

Muthuvel Sivaraman

AVP at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Handles a huge volume of data and is serverless, but it can be considered costly by some users

We use Amazon's services to provide technical support for the product. If you want to have support, Oracle and others offer a single support, and other tools have a direct support window. For Amazon, we need to pay 10 percent of my billing amount for the tool to get support services. Whether to raise a support ticket or not is an issue since ten percent is a huge amount. My company ends up using all the options without help from support. It is very difficult for any common man to understand why there is a need to pay ten percent for support. If I find an issue in the product, and I need to get support from AWS to fix it, then I need to pay ten percent of the tool's bill amount to Amazon. AWS is a very tricky tool because everything is evolving nowadays. AWS engineers are getting hired from other places, and even after that, if I am not getting any technical support, then things will be very nasty. There are some good engineers who help users outside the normal support cycle, but it doesn't meet their needs. I rate the technical support a four out of ten.

Read full review

Argha Das

Senior Associate at Cognizant

Good tool, especially if you're using cloud services and an S3 bucket

There's definitely room for improvement in terms of user-friendliness. One example is that you can't search for jobs directly by file name. You can only search by job name. So, if you want to find a job that works with a specific file, you have to go through each job individually to find the right one. So, I'd like to see a faster search, one where I can search directly by file name. Moreover, the support team could improve by adding things like file transfer status updates. Also, if someone modifies a job and then leaves the company, that shouldn't disrupt the job for active users. It would be better if the job continued to run smoothly regardless of who modified it.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Data catalog and triggers are the two best features for me. AWS Glue has its own data catalog, which makes it great and really easy to use. Triggers are also really good for scheduling the ETL process."

"The solution is serverless so it allows us to transform data while optimizing the cost and performance of Spark jobs."

"I appreciate AWS Glue for its cost-effectiveness."

"AWS Glue is a good solution for developers, they have the ability to write code in different languages and other software."

"Transformations are valuable because you can modify or override complex data logic from an open source or Spark to solve issues."

"The facility to integrate with S3 and the possibility to use Jupyter Notebook inside the pipeline are the most valuable features."

"The two features I find most valuable in AWS Glue are its user interface and ease of use."

"AWS Glue's best features are scalability and cloud-based features."

More AWS Glue pros

"The most valuable feature of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services for me is the availability of connectors."

"This solution allows you to easily access and make use of information that you have in your on-premises environment."

"Customer service and technical support are excellent."

"Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services offers a wide variety of services, including Cloud Data Integration, which is akin to a replica of PowerCenter on the cloud. I particularly like the mass ingestion service."

"I rate the solution's scalability a ten out of ten."

"The feature I found most valuable in Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is the mapping. You just drag, and it maps the data. Mapping is very easy, and it's no code. When you migrate data or when the data interaction happens at the source and destination, the challenge is that you'll get different formats. The validation has to be done in the middleware, and the transformation should happen. In Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, it's very easy to do data validation and transformation compared to any other tool."

"The data integration and synchronization features in IICS improve the data handling processes."

Cons

"It is quite clunky and code-heavy, which is my biggest problem."

"The crucial problem with AWS Glue is that it only works with AWS. It is not an agnostic tool like Pentaho. In PowerCenter, we can install the forms from Google and other vendors, but in the case of AWS Glue, we can only use AWS."

"There could be an enhanced way of managing pure metadata management or data cataloging."

"There should be more connectors for different databases."

"AWS Glue is more costly compared to other tools like Airflow."

"It would be better if it were more user-friendly. The interesting thing we found is that it was a little strange at the beginning. The way Glue works is not very straightforward. After trying different things, for example, we used just the console to create jobs. Then we realized that things were not working as expected. After researching and learning more, we realized that even though the console creates the script for the ETL processes, you need to modify or write your own script in Spark to do everything you want it to do. For example, we are pulling data from our source database and our application database, which is in Aurora. From there, we are doing the ETL to transform the data and write the results into Redshift. But what was surprising is that it's almost like whatever you want to do, you can do it with Glue because you have the option to put together your own script. Even though there are many functionalities and many connections, you have the opportunity to write your own queries to do whatever transformations you need to do. It's a little deceiving that some options are supposed to work in a certain way when you set them up in the console, but then they are not exactly working the right way or not as expected. It would be better if they provided more examples and more documentation on options."

"The solution could be cheaper. The price of the solution is an area that needs improvement."

"The setup and installation is a bit complex without advanced knowledge or training."

More AWS Glue cons

"There's definitely room for improvement in terms of user-friendliness. One example is that you can't search for jobs directly by file name. You can only search by job name. So, if you want to find a job that works with a specific file, you have to go through each job individually to find the right one. So, I'd like to see a faster search, one where I can search directly by file name."

"The product's pricing is definitely an area where a bit of improvement is needed."

"This service could be more cost-effective."

"In terms of data volume processing, Intelligent Cloud Services does not match the efficiency of Power Center."

"Synchronicity is an area for improvement in Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services. For example, when you want real-time or immediate response from the solution when multiple technologies are involved, the integration with Informatica Intelligent Cloud isn't seamless, whether it's the MQ, JMS, or BES service, so the connectivity should be improved a bit. The data governance is good, but what's lacking is a demo. For example, if there's a new feature in Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, the documentation for that new feature is limited, so if Informatica could give a more complete documentation and more demos, that would be better for the users. Right now, there isn't any issue with any of the features of the solution. It's the new feature awareness or user training, and improved connectivity that I'd like to see in the next version of Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services."

"The cloud version of Informatica, although easier and more advanced than PowerCenter, still requires a deep dive to fix bugs."

"The tool is quite good overall, but sometimes the number of modules can be overwhelming. If the development interface could be optimized to have fewer modules, it would be greatly beneficial."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is affordable and there is an option to pay for the solution based on your usage."

"The pricing is a bit higher than other solutions like Athena and EC2. If the pricing becomes more scaled or flexible, it will be good because you have to pay 44 cents just for one DPU for an hour. If you increase DPUs to 5 or 10, the pricing gets multiplied. There are also some time limits like 0 to 10 minutes or 10 to 20 minutes. If the pricing is according to the minutes, it would be better because you have to limit your job to 10 minutes or 20 minutes."

"I would rate the solution a six or seven on a scale of one to ten, with ten being very expensive. Specifically, I rate its pricing a six out of ten."

"I rate the tool an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is expensive."

"AWS Glue is a paid service that doesn't come under the free trial of AWS."

"The overall cost of AWS Glue could be better. It cost approximately $1,000 a month. There is paid support available from AWS Glue."

"AWS Glue uses a pay-as-you-go approach which is helpful. The price of the overall solution is low and is a great advantage."

"The current cost is around forty to fifty thousand a month."

More AWS Glue pricing and cost advice

"The pricing model is something that can be improved."

"In terms of the licensing for Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services, we had the option of paying based on the number of users and paying based on the volume of data, and we went with the data volume licensing option. Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services isn't as expensive as CIG. The pricing for it is okay, so I'm rating it a four out of five in terms of pricing. We did use the email verification and address validation services which weren't part of the contract, so we had to pay additional fees for those services."

"The solution is expensive."

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Answers from the Community

Sandeep Suram

Platform Administrator at Nissan USA

Apr 18, 2022

Which is the best choice for cloud integration: AWS Glue or Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS)?

They both have many features that you will need. AWS Glue will be easier to maintain and integrate because it is a platform on AWS. Informatica is cloud-agnostic. For a large company, you are better off keeping your options open to move to another cloud.

2 out of 3 answers

Akash Shanker

Team Lead at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Aug 16, 2021

@Sandeep Suram, can you please elaborate your use case? What exactly are your requirements?

Read full answer

Joel Buck

Director of Enterprise Architecture at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Aug 16, 2021

Read full answer

See all 3 answers

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

57%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Consumer Goods Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

How do you select the right cloud ETL tool?

AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.

See all answers

How does Talend Open Studio compare with AWS Glue?

We reviewed AWS Glue before choosing Talend Open Studio. AWS Glue is the managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) from Amazon Web Services. AWS Glue enables AWS users to create and manage jobs in...

See all answers

What are the most common use cases for AWS Glue?

AWS Glue's main use case is for allowing users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. The product lets you use this data for analytics, application development, or ma...

See all answers

What do you like most about Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services?

The data integration and synchronization features in IICS improve the data handling processes.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services?

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is affordable for my specific use cases, with the pricing being rated three or four on a scale where one is very cheap. The affordability may vary based on ho...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services?

The tool is quite good overall, but sometimes the number of modules can be overwhelming. If the development interface could be optimized to have fewer modules, it would be greatly beneficial.

See all answers

Comparisons

AWS Database Migration Service vs AWS Glue

Compared 37% of the time

SSIS vs AWS Glue

Compared 5% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs AWS Glue

Compared 5% of the time

Oracle Integration Cloud Service vs AWS Glue

Compared 5% of the time

SnapLogic vs AWS Glue

Compared 4% of the time

More AWS Glue Competitors

No data available

Product Reports

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AWS Glue

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services

April 2025

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services report

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Also Known As

No data available

Informatica IICS, IICS

Overview

AWS Glue is a serverless cloud data integration tool that facilitates the discovery, preparation, movement, and integration of data from multiple sources for machine learning (ML), analytics, and application development. The solution includes additional productivity and data ops tooling for running jobs, implementing business workflows, and authoring.

AWS Glue allows users to connect to more than 70 diverse data sources and manage data in a centralized data catalog. The solution facilitates visual creation, running, and monitoring of extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to load data into users' data lakes. This Amazon product seamlessly integrates with other native applications of the brand and allows users to search and query cataloged data using Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

The solution also utilizes application programming interface (API) operations to transform users' data, create runtime logs, store job logic, and create notifications for monitoring job runs. The console of AWS Glue connects all of these services into a managed application, facilitating the monitoring and operational processes. The solution also performs provisioning and management of the resources required to run users' workloads in order to minimize manual work time for organizations.

AWS Glue Features

AWS Glue groups its features into four categories - discover, prepare, integrate, and transform. Within those groups are the following features:

Automatic schema discovery: AWS Glue crawlers connect to the organization's source or target data source through a prioritized list of classifiers to determine the schema for users' data. This feature creates metadata in companies' AWS Glue Data Catalog.
Schemas for data stream management: The AWS Glue Schema Registry enables users to validate and control the evolution of streaming data through registered Apache Avro schemas for no additional charge.
Automatic scaling based on workload: This feature dynamically scales resources up and down based on workload. The feature controls job resources, removing them depending on how much the workload can be split up.
FindMatches: This feature is for machine learning-based data deduplication and cleansing, and works by finding records that are imperfect matches of each other to remove useless data copies.
Edit, debug, and test ETL code: This feature helps users who have chosen to interactively develop their ETL code by providing development endpoints for editing, debugging, and testing the code it generates for them.
AWS Glue DataBrew: An interactive, point-and-click visual interface for specialists to clean and normalize data without the need to write any code.
AWS Glue Interactive Sessions: This feature simplifies the development of data integration jobs by enabling data engineers to interactively prepare and explore data.
AWS Glue Studio Job Notebooks: This AWS Glue feature provides serverless notebooks with minimal setup, allowing developers to start working in a timely manner.
Complex ETL pipeline building: This feature allows the product to be invoked on a schedule, on demand, or based on an event, allowing users to start multiple jobs in parallel or specify dependencies to build complex ETL pipelines.
AWS Glue Studio: This AWS Glue feature allows users to visually transform data through a drag-and-drop interface. The product automatically generates the code for ETL processes for users' data.

AWS Glue Benefits

AWS Glue offers a wide range of benefits for its users. These benefits include:

Users of other AWS products can easily onboard with AWS Glue, as it is integrated across a wide range of the company's services.
The solution is serverless, which allows for a lower total cost of ownership.
AWS Glue offers more power for users, as it automates much of the effort in building, maintaining, and running ETL jobs.
The product allows customers to easily discover and search across all their AWS datasets through AWS Glue Data Catalog.
AWS Glue does not require additional payment for managing and enforcing schemas for data streams.
The solution facilitates the authority of scalable ETL jobs for beginners and non-coding experts through a drag-and-drop interface.

Reviews from Real Users

Mustapha A., a cloud data engineer at Jems Groupe, likes AWS Glue because it is a product that is great for serverless data transformations.

Liana I., CEO at Quark Technologies SRL, describes AWS Glue as a highly scalable, reliable, and beneficial pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is a next generation iPaaS, which is made up of a growing number of data management products. The productivity of the environment is accelerated by a common user experience across all products, the AI/ML-driven intelligence of the CLAIRE™ engine, and a microservices architecture.

Informatica

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday

2-1-1 San Diego, Hastings, AARP , Ace Hardware

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March 2025

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