Apache Camel vs Informatica PowerCenter

• Camel has an easy learning curve. It is fairly well documented and there are about 5-6 books on Camel.
• There is a large user group and blogs devoted to all things Camel and the developers of Camel provide quick answers and have also been very quick to patch Camel, when bugs are reported.
• Camel integrates well with well known frameworks like Spring, and other middleware products like Apache Karaf and Servicemix.
• There are over 150 components for the Camel framework that help integrate with diverse software platforms.
• Camel is also good for creating microservices.

Read full review

• Informatica has a wide range of support for databases. Pretty much every mainstream DBMS is compatible here.
• Designing ETL mappings and workflows is a very intuitive process, and takes minimal learning time and effort even for a beginner.
• Informatica's biggest strength is its sheer performance. It is unmatched in terms of handling large volumes of data.

Read full review

• I find the "seda" endpoint to be less obvious that it is doing multi-threading than Spring Integration's executor mechanism.
• Integration with Spring Beans is pretty good, but I believe SI's is a bit better (for obvious reasons, both being Spring products).
• SI's use support is probably a bit better/faster and I believe the user base is larger so that there are most questions/answers for SI on StackOverflow

Read full review

• One of the challenges of PowerCenter is the lack of integration between the components and functionality provided by PowerCenter. PowerCenter consists of multiple components such has the repository service, integration service, metadata service. Considerable time and resources were required to install and configure these components before PowerCenter was available for use.
• In order to connect to various data sources such as Netezza database or SAS datasets, PowerCenter requires the installation and configuration of separate plug-ins. We spent considerable time trouble-shooting and debugging problems while trying to get the various plug-ins integrated with PowerCenter and get them up and running as described in the documentation.
• PowerCenter works well with structured data. That is, it is easy to work with input and output data that is pre-defined, fixed, and unchanging. It is much more difficult to work with dynamic data in which new fields are added or removed ad-hoc or if data format changes during the data ingest process. We have not been as successful in using PowerCenter for dynamic data.
• One of the challenges of learning PowerCenter is that it is difficult to find documentation or publications that help you learn the various details about PowerCenter software. Unlike SAS Institute, Informatica does not publish books about PowerCenter. The documentation available with PowerCenter is sparse; we have learned many aspects of this technology through trial and error.

Read full review

• Apache Camel is open source and Java based. So if your engineering team is strong in Java this could be a good framework to adopt.
• Apache camel is open source.
• Camel could be run on OSGi containers like Karaf or Fuse.

Read full review

• Positive - Easy to maintain processes built in Informatica Power Center.
• Positive - Rapidly build and deploy ETL data mappings.
• Positive - Develop the overall workflow process to run all ETL processes for the project.
• Negative - Informatica Power Center can be a bit expensive, so your application needs to warrant the enterprise support.

Read full review