Informatica PowerCenter vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics comparison

Informatica and Hitachi Vantara are both solutions in the Data Integration category. Informatica is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.0, while Hitachi Vantara is ranked #24 with an average rating of 7.6. Informatica holds a 11.0% mindshare in DI, compared to Hitachi Vantara’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of Informatica users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

Informatica PowerCenter

Read 80 Informatica PowerCenter reviews

19,173 Views
16,406 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Read 52 Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics reviews

2,438 Views
1,080 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Informatica PowerCenter

Pentaho Data Integration an...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Pentaho Data Integration and Informatica PowerCenter are two prominent contenders in the data integration space. While Pentaho's free community edition and support affordability make it appealing, Informatica stands out due to its extensive features and high reliability, particularly in complex tasks.

Features: Pentaho Data Integration offers intuitive ease of use, robust support for various data sources, and rapid ETL development, ensuring accessibility across different skill levels. Informatica PowerCenter, on the other hand, excels with extensive transformations, exemplary performance in handling large data volumes, and offers complex integration features ensuring stability and powerful data processing capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Pentaho could improve its admin and monitoring tools, refine error logging, and enhance compatibility with additional programming languages. Challenges include backward compatibility issues and inadequate documentation. Informatica faces criticism for its high costs, complex licensing, and a cumbersome GUI that would benefit from modernized cloud integration support, contrasting with the industry shift towards cloud solutions.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pentaho offers flexible deployment options, including hybrid and cloud environments, with varying levels of customer service enhanced by strong community support. Informatica is mainly centered on-premises but does extend some cloud solutions, providing strong technical support albeit complicated licensing that may alienate smaller businesses.

Pricing and ROI: Pentaho's open-source community edition makes it cost-effective, ideal for smaller enterprises, offering significant ROI by reducing ETL development time. Although Informatica is more expensive, its robust functionality justifies the cost for enterprise-level uses, delivering excellent ROI with comprehensive features that facilitate streamlined operations and meet complex data processing needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Informatica PowerCenter vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Report (Updated: November 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Informatica PowerCenter vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

November 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Informatica PowerCenter

Ranking in Data Integration

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Visualization (8th)

Pentaho Data Integration an...

Ranking in Data Integration

24th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Informatica PowerCenter is 11.0%, up from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics is 1.5%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

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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Ryan Ferdon

Senior Data Engineer at Burgiss

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.

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

"It is easy to use, and it is quick for developing things. It is fairly powerful, and it can integrate with a lot of different platforms without much hassle."

"It is an excellent ETL tool."

"Once you have learned Informatica, it is very 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."

"I would recommend that others considering the solution go ahead and use it for any batch and high volume loads with complex transactions."

"It's a very powerful tool you can use to load data, get data, do the drawing between the tables, and put into the packet in a very fast way."

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

"Easy, scalable, robust platform to integrate heterogeneous source platform's data into the unified data warehouse."

More Informatica PowerCenter pros

"It's very simple compared to other products out there."

"It makes it pretty simple to do some fairly complicated things. Both I and some of our other BI developers have made stabs at using, for example, SQL Server Integration Services, and we found them a little bit frustrating compared to Data Integration. So, its ease of use is right up there."

"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."

"I can use Python, which is open-source, and I can run other scripts, including Linux scripts. It's user-friendly for running any object-based language. That's a very important feature because we live in a world of open-source."

"One of the valuable features is the ability to use PL/SQL statements inside the data transformations and jobs."

"We also haven't had to create any custom Java code. Almost everywhere it's SQL, so it's done in the pipeline and the configuration. That means you can offload the work to people who, while they are not less experienced, are less technical when it comes to logic."

"We can schedule job execution in the BA Server, which is the front-end product we're using right now. That scheduling interface is nice."

"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."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics pros

Cons

"We had stability issues, mostly with JVM size."

"If we could have the option of performance improvement within Informatica, and if it could have more features, that would be ideal."

"An issue which should be addressed is that the solution only allows us to do structured, as opposed to unstructured, data processing."

"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."

"Its interface can be modernized. It is an old product. I have been working with it for 14 years, and it still looks the same. It hasn't been modernized much. It also needs to handle more modern formats, such as JSON files. It works with the old text files and databases, but it does not always work with the newer, modern stuff. You need to make your own programs to support that kind of stuff. Support is also a kind of difficult with Informatica. They don't do direct support and rely on using their distributors around the globe for support, which means that you kind of have to go through this layer of different companies before you get help."

"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."

"Some of the conversions are done inside the product. We use work tables that are created by the engine itself, but the names of the work tables are very long, and they don't have any meaning, which makes it a bit difficult to understand and follow exactly what is happening inside."

"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."

More Informatica PowerCenter cons

"Should provide additional control for the data warehouse"

"The performance could be improved. If they could have analytics perform well on large volumes, that would be a big deal for our products."

"I'm still in the very recent stage concerning Pentaho Data Integration, but it can't really handle what I describe as "extreme data processing" i.e. when there is a huge amount of data to process. That is one area where Pentaho is still lacking."

"The reporting definitely needs improvement. There are a lot of general, basic features that it doesn't have. A simple feature you would expect a reporting tool to have is the ability to search the repository for a report. It doesn't even have that capability. That's been a feature that we've been asking for since the beginning and it hasn't been implemented yet."

"I would like to see improvements made for real-time data processing."

"I work with the Community Edition, therefore I do not have support. There was an issue that I could not resolve with community support."

"Some of the scheduling features about Lumada drive me buggy. The one issue that always drives me up the wall is when Daylight Savings Time changes. It doesn't take that into account elegantly. Every time it changes, I have to do something. It's not a big deal, but it's annoying."

"In the Community edition, it would be nice to have more modules that allow you to code directly within the application. It could have R or Python completely integrated into it, but this could also be because I'm using an older version."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 found the pricing very cost-effective. The licensing is CPU and data source-based."

"We have a site license, but we do pay by the division."

"Our client has purchased the license, and we are using it."

"I rate the product's price a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."

"Informatica PowerCenter is reasonably priced. It is less expensive than Pentaho. There is a standard version fee in Taiwan. It is a one-time yearly subscription price that is approximately $3,010 US dollars for three users."

"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."

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

More Informatica PowerCenter pricing and cost advice

"The price of the regular version is not reasonable and it should be lower."

"The pricing has been pretty good. I'm used to using everything open-source or freeware-based. I understand that organizations need to make sure that the solutions are secure, and that's basically where I hit a roadblock in my current organization. They needed to ensure that we had a license and we had a secure way of accessing it so that no outside parties could get access to our data, but in terms of pricing, considering how much other teams are spending on cloud solutions or even their existing solutions, its price point is pretty good. At this time, there are no additional costs. We just have the licensing fees."

"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."

"There is a good open source option (Community Edition)."

"Sometimes we provide the licenses or the customer can procure their own licenses. Previously, we had an enterprise license. Currently, we are on a community license as this is adequate for our needs."

"I think Lumada's price is fair compared to some of the others, like BusinessObjects, which is was the other thing that I used at my previous job. BusinessObject's price was more reasonable before SAP acquired it. They jacked the price up significantly. Oracle's OBIEE tool was also prohibitively expensive."

"I believe the pricing of the solution is more affordable than the competitors"

"There was a cost analysis done and Pentaho did favorably in terms of cost."

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics 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

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

Comms Service Provider

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...

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

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...

See all answers

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, ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

SSIS vs Informatica PowerCenter

Compared 16% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs Informatica PowerCenter

Compared 14% of the time

Databricks vs Informatica PowerCenter

Compared 13% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs Informatica PowerCenter

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) vs Informatica PowerCenter

Compared 7% of the time

More Informatica PowerCenter Competitors

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 15% of the time

SSIS vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 14% of the time

Talend Open Studio vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 10% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 10% of the time

AWS Glue vs Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Compared 7% of the time

More Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Informatica PowerCenter

December 2024

Download Informatica PowerCenter product report

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

December 2024

Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics report

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Also Known As

PowerCenter

Hitachi Lumada Data Integration, Kettle, Pentaho Data Integration

Learn More

Informatica

Hitachi Vantara

Overview

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.

Pentaho Data Integration stands as a versatile platform designed to cater to the data integration and analytics needs of organizations, regardless of their size. This powerful solution is the go-to choice for businesses seeking to seamlessly integrate data from diverse sources, including databases, files, and applications. Pentaho Data Integration facilitates the essential tasks of cleaning and transforming data, ensuring it's primed for meaningful analysis. With a wide array of tools for data mining, machine learning, and statistical analysis, Pentaho Data Integration empowers organizations to glean valuable insights from their data. What sets Pentaho Data Integration apart is its maturity and a vibrant community of users and developers, making it a reliable and cost-effective option. Pentaho Data Integration offers a range of features, including a comprehensive ETL toolkit, data cleaning and transformation capabilities, robust data analysis tools, and seamless deployment options for data integration and analytics solutions, making it a go-to solution for organizations seeking to harness the power of their data.

Sample Customers

University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, LexisNexis, Rabobank

66Controls, Providential Revenue Agency of Ro Negro, NOAA Information Systems, Swiss Real Estate Institute

Buyer's Guide

Informatica PowerCenter vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

November 2024

Free Report: Informatica PowerCenter vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics

Find out what your peers are saying about Informatica PowerCenter vs. Pentaho Data Integration and Analytics and other solutions. Updated: November 2024.

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