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Informatica PowerCenter vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

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

Informatica PowerCenter
Ranking in Data Integration
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (8th)
Pentaho Data Integration an...
Ranking in Data Integration
23rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Informatica PowerCenter is 10.3%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.4%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Lars Borchers - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Ryan Ferdon - PeerSpot reviewer
Low-code makes development faster than with Python, but there were caching issues
If you're working with a larger data set, I'm not so sure it would be the best solution. The larger things got the slower it was. It was kind of buggy sometimes. And when we ran the flow, it didn't go from a perceived start to end, node by node. Everything kicked off at once. That meant there were times when it would get ahead of itself and a job would fail. That was not because the job was wrong, but because Pentaho decided to go at everything at once, and something would process before it was supposed to. There were nodes you could add to make sure that, before this node kicks off, all these others have processed, but it was a bit tedious. There were also caching issues, and we had to write code to clear the cache every time we opened the program, because the cache would fill up and it wouldn't run. I don't know how hard that would be for them to fix, or if it was fixed in version 10. Also, the UI is a bit outdated, but I'm more of a fan of function over how something looks. One other thing that would have helped with Pentaho was documentation and support on the internet: how to do things, how to set up. I think there are some sites on how to install it, and Pentaho does have a help repository, but it wasn't always the most useful.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It reduces a lot of legacy coding."
"Once you figure it out, it is a powerful and simple ETL tool. Its stability has been very satisfactory."
"It provides everything I need. Nothing is missing. PowerCenter is a good tool for on-premise databases."
"It has a Data Catalog that uses the Model repository."
"The product's initial setup phase is very easy."
"The most valuable aspects of Informatica PowerCenter are the many features, ease of use, and user-friendliness."
"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 ability to scale through partitions helped us to improve the performance."
"I can create faster instructions than writing with SQL or code. Also, I am able to do some background control of the data process with this tool. Therefore, I use it as an ELT tool. I have a station area where I can work with all the information that I have in my production databases, then I can work with the data that I created."
"It is easy to use, install, and start working with."
"Lumada has allowed us to interact with our employees more effectively and compensate them properly. One of the cool things is that we use it to generate commissions for our salespeople and bonuses for our warehouse people. It allows us to get information out to them in a timely fashion. We can also see where they're at and how they're doing."
"The fact that it enables us to leverage metadata to automate data pipeline templates and reuse them is definitely one of the features that we like the best. The metadata injection is helpful because it reduces the need to create and maintain additional ETLs. If we didn't have that feature, we would have lots of duplicated ETLs that we would have to create and maintain. The data pipeline templates have definitely been helpful when looking at productivity and costs."
"The fact that it's a low-code solution is valuable. It's good for more junior people who may not be as experienced with programming."
"We're using the PDI and the repository function, and they give us the ability to easily generate reporting and output, and to access data. We also like the ability to schedule."
"The solution has a free to use community version."
"The way it has improved our product is by giving our users the ability to do ad hoc reports, which is very important to our users. We can do predictive analysis on trends coming in for contracts, which is what our product does. The product helps users decide which way to go based on the predictive analysis done by Pentaho. Pentaho is not doing predictions, but reporting on the predictions that our product is doing. This is a big part of our product."
 

Cons

"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."
"In terms of performance improvement and tuning, there should be a bit more guidance and documentation."
"The solution could have better documentation on basic steps or blocks that specify what to do."
"It would be good to recreate the entire interface to make it easier for users to build workflows."
"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."
"Informatica, in my opinion, is very rigid and not very flexible, whereas platforms like Alteryx or Matillion are very flexible and agile."
"PowerCenter has three clients. I wish they would consolidate everything into one GUI, not three. Also, we had a persistent issue with the Informatica Developer tool but it was solved when we migrated to the newest one."
"The solution can improve by providing more connectivity by having native ODBC or JDBC connections available. It will be easier and more people could start using it."
"Parallel execution could be better in Pentaho. It's very simple but I don't think it works well."
"One thing that I don't like, just a little, is the backward compatibility."
"I was not happy with the Pentaho Report Designer because of the way it was set up. There was a zone and, under it, another zone, and under that another one, and under that another one. There were a lot of levels and places inside the report, and it was a little bit complicated. You have to search all these different places using a mouse, clicking everywhere... each report is coded in a binary file... You cannot search with a text search tool..."
"​There is not a data quality or MDM solution in the Pentaho DI suite.​"
"It's not very stable, at least not in the case of the community edition. I'm working with the community edition right now and I think perhaps it is because of that it is not very stable, it causes the system to sometimes hang. I'm not sure if this is the case for pair tiers."
"I would like to see support for some additional cloud sources. It doesn't support Azure, for example. I was trying to do a PoC with Azure the other day but it seems they don't support it."
"Since Hitachi took over, I don't feel that the documentation is as good within the solution. It used to have very good help built right in."
"I work with different databases. I would like to work with more connectors to new databases, e.g., DynamoDB and MariaDB, and new cloud solutions, e.g., AWS, Azure, and GCP. If they had these connectors, that would be great. They could improve by building new connectors. If you have native connections to different databases, then you can make instructions more efficient and in a more natural way. You don't have to write any scripts to use that connector."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The license model is CPU based."
"Since the solution's cost is higher, I rate the pricing as a five out of ten."
"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."
"We have a site license, but we do pay by the division."
"Its maintenance is expensive."
"Our customers pay a licensing fee yearly."
"I consider this to be an expensive product."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"The solution reduced our ETL development time by a lot because a whole project used to take about a month to get done previously. After having Lumada, it took just a week. For a big company in Brazil, it saves a team at least $10,000 a month."
"I use it because it is free. I download from their page for free. I don't have to pay for a license. With other tools, I have to pay for the licenses. That is why I use Pentaho."
"I mostly used the open-source version. I didn't work with a license."
"There was a cost analysis done and Pentaho did favorably in terms of cost."
"For most development tasks, the Enterprise edition should be sufficient. It depends on the type of support that you require for your production environment."
"I believe the pricing of the solution is more affordable than the competitors"
"We did a two or three-year deal the last time we did it. As compared to other solutions, at least so far in our experience, it has been very affordable. The licensing is by component. So, you need to make sure you only license the components that you really intend to use. I am not sure if we have relicensed after the Hitachi acquisition, but previously, multi-year renewals resulted in a good discount. I'm not sure if this is still the case. We've had the full suite for a lot of years, and there is just the initial cost. I am not aware of any additional costs."
"I primarily work on the Community Version, which is available to use free of charge."
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Comparison Review

it_user90069 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
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...
Which ETL tool would you recommend to populate data from OLTP to OLAP?
Hi Rajneesh, yes here is the feature comparison between the community and enterprise edition : https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/pdf/brochure/leverage-open-source-benefits-with-assurance-of-hita...
What do you think can be improved with Hitachi Lumada Data Integrations?
In my opinion, the reporting side of this tool needs serious improvements. In my previous company, we worked with Hitachi Lumada Data Integration and while it does a good job for what it’s worth, ...
What do you use Hitachi Lumada Data Integrations for most frequently?
My company has used this product to transform data from databases, CSV files, and flat files. It really does a good job. We were most satisfied with the results in terms of how many people could us...
 

Also Known As

PowerCenter
Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, LexisNexis, Rabobank
66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute
Find out what your peers are saying about Informatica PowerCenter vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.