Fivetran vs Informatica PowerCenter comparison

Fivetran and Informatica are both solutions in the Data Integration category. Fivetran is ranked #13 with an average rating of 7.9, while Informatica is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.9. Fivetran holds a 2.2% mindshare in DI, compared to Informatica’s 10.3% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Fivetran users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of Informatica users who would recommend it.

Fivetran

Read 25 Fivetran reviews

3,872 Views
2,678 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Informatica PowerCenter

Read 80 Informatica PowerCenter reviews

18,129 Views
15,555 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Fivetran

Informatica PowerCenter

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Informatica PowerCenter and Fivetran are both renowned data integration platforms. Despite Informatica's extensive feature set, Fivetran often holds the upper hand due to its ease of use and faster deployment times.

Features: Informatica PowerCenter offers advanced capabilities for complex transformations, excellent scalability, and supports a wide range of data sources. It provides extensive customization options allowing for intricate data management. Fivetran focuses on automation and minimal configuration, making integration into cloud applications swift and efficient, with a strong emphasis on effortless operation for standard ETL processes.

Room for Improvement: Informatica PowerCenter can improve in ease of use due to its steep learning curve. Enhancing automation could streamline the setup process. Additional support for new data integrations would be beneficial. Fivetran could benefit from enhanced support structures and more comprehensive documentation for complex setups. Improving the customization options would cater to more specific user needs. Increasing the number of integrations could strengthen its overall offering.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Informatica PowerCenter requires significant setup and configuration efforts, benefiting from strong customer support and resources for enterprises. It does require a higher level of initial investment in time and training. Fivetran offers a straightforward setup process, focusing on simplicity and efficiency, which appeals to organizations seeking rapid deployment. However, it may lack the depth in customer service compared to its competitors, offering room for enhancements in support.

Pricing and ROI: Informatica PowerCenter involves higher initial setup costs, justified by its extensive customization and enterprise-grade features, and tends to deliver high ROI for companies with complex data operations. Fivetran offers a more competitive pricing model appealing to startups and mid-size businesses, providing rapid ROI through efficient data integration capabilities. The choice between them relies heavily on the specific needs and scale of data operations within the organization.

To learn more, read our detailed Fivetran vs. Informatica PowerCenter Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Fivetran vs. Informatica PowerCenter

January 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

Fivetran

Ranking in Data Integration

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Replication (3rd), Cloud Data Integration (7th)

Informatica PowerCenter

Ranking in Data Integration

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Visualization (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Fivetran is 2.2%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Informatica PowerCenter is 10.3%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Erik Jones

Head of BI and Analytics at HyperScience

Solution reduces time-to-value; high ROI

Fivetran has room for improvement in data pipeline observability. The Fivetran logs are fairly basic, compared to, for example, the insight Fivetran gives into helping users understanding the performance of data pipelines. So I think their observability into the pipeline itself could be improved. In addition, Fivetran is in the very early stages of allowing other companies to access its metadata API, but that's something that could use improvement, and I know that they're working on right now. We use a separate tool for "reverse ETL", which is the opposite of what Fivetran does; it pushes data from your data warehouse back out to business applications. If Fivetran pulls data from those same applications, they should also enable users to push it back. I would love to do both ETL and reverse ETL in the same tool. It would be nice if Fivetran offered both their regular offering plus the reverse ETL option as well.

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Lars Borchers

Senior BI Backend Developer at ALD Automotive Portugal

A stable and reliable product that provides a variety of features for data integration

The solution is not for newcomers. It has an old touch. The solution must improve the integration with new services. It was part of the program at Informatica when they moved to their cloud platform. It is integrated. However, from an on-premise perspective, we need to buy licenses for PowerExchange. If we want a native driver to access a special service, we need to extend our license to those services. It is expensive. I don't like that it's not all included in the solution.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The user interface is mostly UI-based, eliminating the need for a lot of coding."

"The compare feature is the most valuable piece of it."

"Making the decision to implement Fivetran was supported by the fact that they have better connectors than other competitors."

"It is easy for users to get accustomed to the tool due to its gentle learning curve and clear error transparency."

"Its arrays are powerful enough to handle migrations even when the replication is happening in the background, without causing any trouble with the ongoing traffic."

"Fivetran's most valuable feature is replication."

"The simplicity of the solution is its valuable feature."

"There's the general feature of the platform where it just makes it very easy to integrate different things, but I would say a specific difference is their integration of DBT,."

More Fivetran pros

"It's a complete package, which is why we use this solution."

"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."

"Technical support is great. It's one of the reasons we really like them. When you compare support from IBM and support from Informatica, Informatica is much better."

"The reliability of the product and the way of orchestration of different services is valuable to us."

"Informatica PowerCenter is a very good ETL tool."

"Among all the solutions I have used, I found Informatica PowerCenter to be much more stable in terms of application."

"It is UI friendly and has all the advantages of an ETL tool."

"The support is valuable. There are also open-source ETL products, which work very well, but there is no support. When we face a production problem, being able to get support is valuable, and it brings efficiency. With an open-source solution, we can't engage anyone to resolve the problem as quickly as possible."

More Informatica PowerCenter pros

Cons

"Fivetran is very expensive for data sources with a lot of rows, such as email data. I would like to see cheaper pricing for data sources like that."

"Fivetran should add more connectors because its competitors, like Airbyte, have more connectors."

"An in-line data quality checking capability is missing"

"The documentation is decent, but it's hard to find information online about Fivetran. For example, if you try to search for an error code, you won't find much information about it in forums."

"I would like to see an improvement in the support offered by Fivetran."

"This solution needs to improve its real-time data and transformation availability."

"The connections with SAP must be improved."

"More connectors are needed for exotic, popular, and rising star portals."

More Fivetran cons

"What needs improvement in Informatica PowerCenter is the cloud experience because, nowadays, other companies, such as AWS, Azure, and Google, have more experience in the cloud. The pricing for Informatica PowerCenter on the cloud is also very expensive for customers, so some customers prefer open-source tools or lower-priced tools, such as Azure. From my point of view, Informatica must work on the pricing policy and review the policy on the cloud for Informatica PowerCenter or propose more tools with lower pricing. Clients want the automatic integration of Informatica PowerCenter with other tools. Currently, the integration process is manual, and you have to add other tools to facilitate the integration, especially with the DevOps methodology. You need scripts and tools for the integration, and you'll need to use other integration tools if you want automatic deployment for Informatica PowerCenter, so this is another area for improvement in the solution. What I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is for the integration with APIs to be simpler, because currently, the API integration feature of Informatica PowerCenter is very difficult. It's not intuitive. You have to facilitate API integration and the real-time streaming of messages in Kafka, for example, so that should be improved."

"The UI is a little outdated."

"Requires an established data center because there is no option for software as a service."

"It would be nice to have all tools in one place. CDC needs more effort, as it's only easy to develop if you are familiar with Linux."

"Its scalability can be improved. It is not scalable."

"While Informatica is great for data-integration, it does not have any analytics features. Thus, organizations have to always look for another product for their BI needs."

"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."

"Integration with Artificial Intelligence would benefit this solution."

More Informatica PowerCenter cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In the first year, we were given a very good discount. It was approximately 20,000 Euros per year. In the third year, we purchased credit for two years and the price was 33,000 Euros per year."

"When you have a lot of workflows and complex use cases, pricing goes down as you use it more."

"I would say they're a little bit on the expensive side, and their contract process is not particularly good, but there is a lot of potential flexibility."

"The pricing model is okay and mid to large companies will not have an issue with it."

"The product is reasonably expensive"

"Fivetran is very expensive, and its database-driven pricing model is outdated."

"The licensing costs are extremely high for the usage of somebody who has one GB or two GB of usage per day for real-time traffic. There are many other players in the market which are similarly priced or competitively priced. On average per month, it used to come around 12,000-15,000 USD, which is very high."

"I can't give exact amounts because that's based on usage, but it's more expensive than some of its competitors."

More Fivetran pricing and cost advice

"We are using an annual license for Informatica PowerCenter."

"The solution is in the middle price range compared to other solutions."

"Its maintenance is expensive."

"Licensing costs are excessive and pose an obstacle to someone who lacks familiarity with the solution and wishes to have a proper understanding of it."

"The pricing for Informatica PowerCenter is expensive. Some clients have simple needs and only want to integrate and store data. Some clients have small needs, while some clients have bigger needs and focus more on performance and time. The licensing cost for Informatica PowerCenter isn't good. In my project, if I remember correctly, the company pays €20,000 per year for the Informatica PowerCenter license. I'm not aware of additional costs that you need to pay for some features of the solution. On a scale of one to five, I'm rating its price a three."

"I consider this to be an expensive product."

"The licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"We are satisfied with the pricing."

More Informatica PowerCenter pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user90069

BI Expert at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 20, 2014

Informatica PowerCenter vs. Microsoft SSIS - each technology has its advantages but also have similarities

Technology has made it easier for businesses to organize and manipulate data to get a clearer picture of what’s going on with their business. Notably, ETL tools have made managing huge amounts of data significantly easier and faster, boosting many organizations’ business intelligence operations…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

31%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What's the deal with the HVR software acquisition?

As a user of HVR Software I followed this deal closely. Fivetran is apparently trying to establish more in its sector and by buying an already established data replication software, they become som...

See all answers

Does HVR Software provide reliable insights?

I honestly can't think of another data replication software that can give you better statistics and insight than HVR Software. There's the feature for topology and statistics and both of them can ...

See all answers

How much traffic can HVR Software handle?

As someone who works at a company where a high volume of information is replicated and has tried several data replication softwares, I can tell you that you're looking at the right one. HVR Softwar...

See all answers

How does Azure Data Factory compare with Informatica PowerCenter?

Azure Data Factory is flexible, modular, and works well. In terms of cost, it is not too pricey. It offers the stability and reliability I am looking for, good scalability, and is easy to set up an...

See all answers

Which is better - SSIS or Informatica PowerCenter?

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 compo...

See all answers

Which Informatica product would you choose - PowerCenter or Cloud Data Integration?

Complex transformations can easily be achieved using PowerCenter, which has all the features and tools to establish a real data governance strategy. Additionally, PowerCenter is able to manage huge...

See all answers

Comparisons

AWS Database Migration Service vs Fivetran

Compared 16% of the time

Oracle GoldenGate vs Fivetran

Compared 13% of the time

Qlik Replicate vs Fivetran

Compared 9% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs Fivetran

Compared 8% of the time

Zapier vs Fivetran

Compared 2% of the time

More Fivetran Competitors

SSIS vs Informatica PowerCenter

Compared 16% of the time

Databricks vs Informatica PowerCenter

Compared 14% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs Informatica PowerCenter

Compared 14% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs Informatica PowerCenter

Compared 8% of the time

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) vs Informatica PowerCenter

Compared 7% of the time

More Informatica PowerCenter Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fivetran

February 2025

Download Fivetran product report

Buyer's Guide

Informatica PowerCenter

January 2025

Download Informatica PowerCenter product report

Also Known As

No data available

PowerCenter

Overview

Fivetran is a data integration and migration solution that centralizes data from various sources into a data warehouse (such as Snowflake or BigQuery) for analytics. Its most valuable features include replication and managed pipelines, integration with DBT for data transformation, and many source connections.

Fivetran is easy to use, with fast data migration and an intuitive portal for easy setup and troubleshooting. It has helped organizations integrate and manage data, saving time and resources.

Fivetran

Informatica PowerCenter is a data integration and data visualization tool. The solution works as an enterprise data integration platform that helps organizations access, transform, and integrate data from various systems. The product is designed to support companies in the full cycle of a project, from its initial rollout to critical deployments. Informatica PowerCenter allows developers and analysts to collaborate while accelerating the work process to deploy projects within days instead of months.

The Advanced edition of the product provides an additional real-time engine which allows companies to have always-on enterprise data integration. This ensures seamless collaboration and increment of data lineage visibility and impacts analysis.

The Premium edition of the solution offers an early warning system that detects unexpected behaviors or incorrect utilization of resources in the workflows and alerts companies in the case that these occur. This version of the product also offers automatic data validation, which ensures data accuracy and reduces testing time and expenditure of resources for by up to 90%.

Informatica PowerCenter Features

The product provides users with various features which allow them to execute data integration initiatives such as analytics, data warehousing, data governance, consolidation, and application migration. The features of the solution include:

Collaboration: Informatica PowerCenter offers role-based tools and processes which enable business self-service while benefiting from high-quality IT resources.
Automation: Through various automations and easy-to-use software, users can utilize graphical and codeless tools and initiate effective data integration without additional knowledge.
Scalability: The tool provides high scalability to users, which ensures seamless performance and minimum downtime. PowerCenter also has adaptive load balancing, pushdown optimization, and dynamic partitioning.
Monitoring: Through the extensive monitoring feature, the operations and governance of the solution are easily overseen by users. The tool also provides alerts that can prevent damage to the system.
Real-time data: Through real-time data, users can monitor applications and analytics, ensuring their efficient operation.
Prototyping: Informatica lets its users collaborate with information technology to prototype, profile, and validate results in a timely manner.
Connectivity: Users can access and integrate data from different types of sources through high-performance connectors.
Automated data validation testing: The product offers script-free automated and repeatable audit and validation of data.
Data transformation: This feature allows users to use comprehensive parsing of JSON, PDF, XML, Microsoft Office, and the Internet of Things (IoT) for non-relation data.
Cloud applications connectivity: The product allows for seamless connection to cloud application sources and targets.

Informatica PowerCenter Benefits

The benefits of using Informatica PowerCenter include:

The tool can work over a wide range of systems and platforms and also allows for lean integration.
It enhances the quality and speed of performance and optimizes the cost of the process for your organization.
PowerCenter supports multiple databases, including TPump, Parallel Transporter Fastload, and Teradata MLoad.
The tool is very easy to monitor and maintain, which simplifies the data integration process for companies.
The centralized error logging system allows users to locate errors in a timely manner and correct them.
The tool can convert data from an application to another format, as it serves as one of the most powerful data transformation solutions.
PowerCenter can also serve as middleware between two applications.
The solution offers both parallel processing and load balancing.
PowerCenter is a tool with a high level of security, which also minimizes essential administration activities.
The solution ensures the quality of information, as it does not allow invalid or unwanted data to be uploaded to the source.

Reviews from Real Users

Yahya T., a developer and architect at L'Oreal, says the product is stable, provides good support, and integrating it with other systems is very fast.

Mohamed E., a senior manager for Data management and data governance at a tech company, says PowerCenter is stable, mature, and offers flexibility in building the pipeline and has a drag-and-drop mode because it's GUI-based; technical support is brilliant.

Informatica

Sample Customers

DocuSign, Oldcastle Infrastructure, Crossmedia, Talkdesk, Chubbies, Brandwatch

University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, LexisNexis, Rabobank

Buyer's Guide

Fivetran vs. Informatica PowerCenter

January 2025

Free Report: Fivetran vs. Informatica PowerCenter

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