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Informatica PowerCenter vs Qlik Sense comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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 Visualization
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (2nd)
Qlik Sense
Ranking in Data Visualization
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Data Visualization category, the mindshare of Informatica PowerCenter is 1.7%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qlik Sense is 7.3%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Visualization
 

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.
Vishal_Goyal - PeerSpot reviewer
In-memory data storage boosts performance
The advantages compared to other BI tools show architectural differences. The main feature is that it keeps all the data in memory. It doesn't retrieve the data from data sources when I need it on the dashboard; instead, it quickly provides the desired data, making it very fast compared to other BI tools. The ROI is very high using Qlik Sense. It offers many benefits of BI. It is flexible from a developer's point of view, allowing me to accomplish many tasks compared to other BI tools. From an end-user perspective, it's convenient and performance-oriented, providing something meaningful from all the organization's data.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The interface is very clean and clear."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring tools and the reporting manager."
"It has good standard features for ETL development."
"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 provides monitoring and we can therefore be aware of what is happening when we are handling jobs."
"We have found the PowerCenter and B2B data transformation most valuable."
"I like the completeness of the way I can build ETL workflows."
"The technical support is excellent."
"The drag and drop functionality provides an easy and fast development approach."
"Self-service use of the desktop version with the ability to port applications into the server environment."
"We can generate various graphs, various reports and we can mainly use it for dashboard related things. We can create a dashboard with live data and we can make decisions based on this information,"
"It allows you to create a new column using split on a current column, which we find very useful."
"The ability to access data from multiple sources in one application. This has been invaluable."
"All the visualizations have been so valuable."
"Qlik Sense makes it very easy to build interactive presentations for meetings."
"My organization now has data from disparate systems at their fingertips in a way that lets them get the answers they need when they want it."
 

Cons

"Integrated Reporting service should be more smoothly transitioned from view to function to be in sync with the main design."
"There can be scalability issues. Huge amounts of data ingestion will impact performance."
"Support could be better."
"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."
"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 licensing can be improved. It should be features-wise and not bundle-wise. A bundle will definitely be costly. In addition, we might use one or two features. That's why the pricing model should be based on the features. The model should be flexible enough based on the features. Their support should also be more responsive to premium customers."
"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 PowerCenter could improve on the documentation for the implementation. The documents provided are not very good for a new user."
"Some of the charts are still a bit basic and screen rendering on different sized monitors can be an issue."
"More options for the layout."
"They should generally focus more on the evolution of current capabilities rather than doing everything but only at 50% effectiveness."
"Qlik Sense should have a conversion tool which automatically converts QlikView to Qlik Sense, so customers can easily migrate between the products of Qlik."
"They need to keep it as simple as possible but include as much advanced functionality as possible by positioning all the objects on the page, changing colors for all the objects, improving sheets actions, etc."
"Qlik Sense requires one to have a lot of technical knowledge."
"The only thing I would like to see is the ability to create a master app that opens when a user creates a new app that has all the master items, colors, logos, etc., that my organization uses. This would help with keeping master items the same across the apps and would make development a little quicker."
"Error handling is an area that needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is for big enterprises. We have leveraged Informatica for big enterprises but not for small and medium enterprises because it is a very costly product as compared to other products. We propose this solution only for enterprise customers. For small to medium enterprises, we would propose the Microsoft solution. Its licensing is currently bundle-wise. It should be features-wise and not bundle-wise."
"Our customers pay a licensing fee yearly."
"The license model is CPU based."
"The solution is in the middle price range compared to other solutions."
"We have found the pricing very cost-effective. The licensing is CPU and data source-based."
"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."
"It's much more expensive, almost three times more expensive than most other solutions."
"Licensing is a one time cost. But maintenance costs depend on what you want, how long you need it. Maintenance is a kind of insurance. With health insurance, you don't know whether you will get sick or need to go to hospital or not but you have to have insurance. It's the same thing with support. If you have that expertise in resolving issues, if you have enough experience in your IT department, I would say you don't need the support. But in practice, they recommend you go with the support. If you want support you have to pay for it."
"Qlik Sense and its pricing model can follow any scalability."
"You need to pay 5,000 Norwegian kroner per user. Microsoft Power BI is slightly more expensive than Qlik Sense."
"I'm not able to reveal the licensing cost for Qlik Sense, but because it was a huge deal, the cost was less than the usual cost. The license wasn't that costly. It was the infrastructure that was very costly."
"Costs are a little high on the license/token side. However, if you look at the TCO, it is not too bad, particularly against Power BI."
"The cost is not bad considering the flexibility and support you receive from Qlik. I believe it is worth the cost."
"Licensing can start to get expensive, but compared to other tools in this space it is about average."
"Licensing is quite good, easy, but slightly expensive."
"The license mechanism of Qlik is quite complicated and not exchangeable. Such as 2016, they charge licenses by token, 1500$ for a token / 1 user. 2018: they change to 2 kinds of licenses: professional 1500$ / user, analyzer 800$ / user. 2019: they support subscription with 70$ Monthly for professional, 40$ monthly for analyzers, but for those you’re using perpetual licenses, they don't support acquiring more subscription licenses. The maintenance fee yearly are also high, 20% of the perpetual license."
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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
6%
Educational Organization
60%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
4%
 

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...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
What do you like most about Qlik Sense?
The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies.
 

Also Known As

PowerCenter
QlikSense
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, LexisNexis, Rabobank
Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
Find out what your peers are saying about Informatica PowerCenter vs. Qlik Sense and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.