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Informatica PowerCenter pros and cons

Vendor: Informatica

4.0 out of 5

80 reviews
91% willing to recommend

4,635 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Informatica PowerCenter is renowned for its powerful ETL capabilities and exceptional scalability through partitions, which enhance performance and data reliability. It excels in integrating structured and semi-structured data and offers robust support for business rule validation. Despite its strengths, challenges include limited scalability with large data volumes, complex API integrations, and a costly licensing model. Informatica PowerCenter requires an established data center, impacting flexibility for cloud migration.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Informatica PowerCenter is a powerful and reliable ETL tool with robust data integration and transformation capabilities, making it a preferred choice for large-scale data projects.

It offers impressive support for varied databases, providing effective performance and ease of use for multi-database environments.

The tool's scalability through partitions and optimization features significantly enhance development performance and data management efficiency.

Informatica PowerCenter's technical support is highly regarded, offering comprehensive assistance that surpasses other similar ETL tools.

Rich integration and transformation capabilities in Informatica PowerCenter enable efficient handling of complex data processes without requiring extensive coding efforts.

CONS

Informatica PowerCenter lacks scalability, particularly for ingesting large volumes of data, which impacts performance.

There are integration challenges, including limited connectivity with modern data sources like NoSQL and difficulties with API integration.

The licensing is costly and inflexible, with a preference for feature-based pricing.

Support could be more responsive, as it currently relies on global distributors, creating delays in assistance.

Documentation needs improvement for clarity, especially for new users and for performance tuning guidance.

Informatica PowerCenter Pros review quotes

YT

Developer, Architect at L'Oreal

Sep 26, 2022

What I like most about Informatica PowerCenter is that it's the best tool in the market for data integration. Currently, I work in L'Oréal, where a new system from SAP is used. Informatica PowerCenter integration with SAP is very, very fast and very, very simple, so you have the server flow from SAP, and through Informatica PowerCenter, you can ingest the data and make that data available for the business more quickly.

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reviewer1318821

Technology Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 16, 2021

Complex transformations can be easily achieved by using PowerCenter. The processing layer does transformations and other things. About 80% of my transformations can be achieved by using the middle layer. For the remaining 15% to 20% transformations, I can go in and create stored procedures in the respective databases. Mapplets is the feature through which we can reuse transformations across pipelines. Transformations and caching are the key features that we have been using frequently. Informatica PowerCenter is one of the best solutions or products in the data integration space. We have extensively used PowerCenter for integration purposes. We usually look at the best bridge solution in our architecture so that it can sustain for maybe a couple of years. Usually, we go with the solution that fits best and has proven and time-tested technology.

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RP

Solutions & Achitecture Data Analyst Specialist at a construction company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 31, 2019

In the end, you have structured, proper data for use in an integrated BI solution.

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Informatica PowerCenter

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Learn what your peers think about Informatica PowerCenter. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.

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Sr.Manager - Data Management & Data Governance at a tech company with 201-500 employees

Sep 28, 2022

To me, what's most valuable in Informatica PowerCenter is the flexibility in building the integration pipeline. Usually, you need to have a platform to be able to integrate with different technologies, including legacy data such as the mainframe. The platform should also be rich enough to transform the data per your business requirement, with no restrictions. Rich integration and rich transformation capabilities are the two key capabilities in Informatica PowerCenter. The solution also offers ease of use. Another valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the drag-and-drop integration because it's GUI-based, similar to IBM and Oracle.

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Data Integration Architect at InfoCepts

May 23, 2024

Informatica PowerCenter provides multiple transformations in one particular toolset. You don't need to apply any coding.

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reviewer2042916

Analytics Insights - Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Dec 5, 2022

We can scale the product.

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Resource Manager at Pyramid Consulting

May 23, 2024

Error handling capability is quite good in Informatica PowerCenter because it provides a very detailed session log, which is really helpful to identify errors.

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reviewer1094502

Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 24, 2022

Enterprise-scale ETL solution that's very stable and is easy to scale. It integrates and connects with multiple new systems, both structured and semi-structured.

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MK

Data Scientist at IME

Aug 7, 2019

Technical support, and their approach is good. They have a support portal and support tickets. If you open a ticket it has multiple levels of severity from level one to very high or critical.

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IB

Service Delivery Manager & Data Governance Consultant at Master Works

Oct 28, 2021

It has helped us monetize.

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Informatica PowerCenter Cons review quotes

YT

Developer, Architect at L'Oreal

Sep 26, 2022

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.

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reviewer1318821

Technology Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 16, 2021

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.

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RP

Solutions & Achitecture Data Analyst Specialist at a construction company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 31, 2019

Integration with Artificial Intelligence would benefit this solution.

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Informatica PowerCenter

Free Report: Informatica PowerCenter Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Informatica PowerCenter. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.

824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Sr.Manager - Data Management & Data Governance at a tech company with 201-500 employees

Sep 28, 2022

Areas for improvement in Informatica PowerCenter include scalability and high availability or the clustering configuration because that's still very basic. The elasticity or scaling of the platform needs a lot of improvement. For example, when it comes to DR handling or building an active-active or active-passive cluster, Informatica PowerCenter is still not that powerful. Automation also needs improvement in the solution. Improving automation leads to some improvement in the stability of Informatica PowerCenter and other aspects related to it. What I'd like to see in the next release of Informatica PowerCenter is real-time capability because the solution is mainly for patches, and to have real-time integration, you need to count on some additional components from Informatica. I would expect more integration and a complete platform in terms of real-time capability or patching with minimal interventions or minimal components to be aligned together.

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Data Integration Architect at InfoCepts

May 23, 2024

Improvement is needed in terms of some new transformation because API integration and all those things are very critical nowadays.

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reviewer2042916

Analytics Insights - Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Dec 5, 2022

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

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Resource Manager at Pyramid Consulting

May 23, 2024

When I deal with very large amounts of data, there have been performance issues.

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reviewer1094502

Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 24, 2022

This solution needs the functionality to do batch processing of data. It also lacks connectivity to NoSQL, unstructured data sources.

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MK

Data Scientist at IME

Aug 7, 2019

The licensing cost for Informatica is very high. Other all-in-one solutions have much lower prices than Informatica.

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IB

Service Delivery Manager & Data Governance Consultant at Master Works

Oct 28, 2021

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.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 71)

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Popular Comparisons

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