Dataloader is an incredible asset for a large organization or an organization that has a robust Salesforce environment. Specifically, Dataloader has allowed our sales team to focus on driving sales while our operations team can load the data they need in a manner that allows for robust reporting and tracking on our sales process. Organizations with less robust Salesforce environments or Salesforce environments in which many people are expected to maintain their own information likely do not need Dataloader.
Ideal for daily standard ETL use cases whether the data is sourced from / transferred to the native connectors (like SQL Server) or FTP. Best if the company uses MS suite of tools. There are better options in the market for chaining tasks where you want a custom flow of executions depending on the outcome of each process or if you want advanced functionality like API connections, etc.
Extracting Salesforce attachments in original file format! I do not know of a tool that can do this better, or more efficiently! This is a huge benefit to companies that would like to extract attachments from Salesforce for tasks like data migrations.
Cross-object data extract within one file. You can pull data from related objects as long as there is a populated lookup from the object you are extracting, to another object (Child or Parent).
UI is simple and requires very little to no training. Given the acquisition of Mulesoft by Salesforce, I would not be surprised if DataLoader.IO is rolled out as the new global data loading tool for Salesforce.
At the moment, I can't find a way to rename jobs. This would be useful to organize what was previously created hastily by techs in a rush.
A preview of the job, especially upserts, would take a great deal of stress away from some of us (especially those who are not so confident in their ETL practice).
A native vlookup equivalent may be a welcome addition.
SSIS has been a bit neglected by Microsoft and new features are slow in coming.
When importing data from flat files and Excel workbooks, changes in the data structure will cause the extracts to fail. Workarounds do exist but are not easily implemented. If your source data structure does not change or rarely changes, this negative is relatively insignificant.
While add-on third-party SSIS tools exist, there are only a small number of vendors actively supporting SSIS and license fees for production server use can be significant especially in highly-scaled environments.
It is easy to use and doesn't require a security token, so I enjoy using it. It also doesn't require any download or installation, which is sometimes a blocker to gettingthings done if the company has limits. also, the dataloader.io is easy for other people to pick up, so others can have visibility into the data jobs that have occurred
Some features should be revised or improved, some tools (using it with Visual Studio) of the toolbox should be less schematic and somewhat more flexible. Using for example, the CSV data import is still very old-fashioned and if the data format changes it requires a bit of manual labor to accept the new data structure
It is an intuitive application to use. Within a few clicks, you can be signed in to your org and ready to perform tasks. Data imports/exports/updates are streamlined so you can quickly start and configure your jobs. These can run in the background while you set up new tasks. Job history and tasks currently running on are on your home screen.
SQL Server Integration Services is a relatively nice tool but is simply not the ETL for a global, large-scale organization. With developing requirements such as NoSQL data, cloud-based tools, and extraordinarily large databases, SSIS is no longer our tool of choice.
Raw performance is great. At times, depending on the machine you are using for development, the IDE can have issues. Deploying projects is very easy and the tool set they give you to monitor jobs out of the box is decent. If you do very much with it you will have to write into your projects performance tracking though.
Customer support might be where Dataloader.io saves money. Most of the competitors offer 24/7 live support but Dataloader.io only offers support via email and the community. Those types of support work fine until you need an answer right away. Some questions can't wait until the next business day or business hours for a reply.
The support, when necessary, is excellent. But beyond that, it is very rarely necessary because the user community is so large, vibrant and knowledgable, a simple Google query or forum question can answer almost everything you want to know. You can also get prewritten script tasks with a variety of functionality that saves a lot of time.
The implementation may be different in each case, it is important to properly analyze all the existing infrastructure to understand the kind of work needed, the type of software used and the compatibility between these, the features that you want to exploit, to understand what is possible and which ones require integration with third-party tools
I have used salesforce inspector also for operations like import and export of data from custom objects but it doesn't work well when you have data in huge numbers. Instead of using Salesforce Inspector, one should go for Dataloader.io if the number of records is huge to be dealt with.
I had nothing to do with the choice or install. I assume it was made because it's easy to integrate with our SQL Server environment and free. I'm not sure of any other enterprise level solution that would solve this problem, but I would likely have approached it with traditional scripting. Comparably free, but my own familiarity with trad scripts would be my final deciding factor. Perhaps with some further training on SSIS I would have a different answer.
HUGE time saving. When we need to clean or review data, we used to have to do it line by line. This can do the work within excel and make cleanup/management an afternoons work as opposed to a week.
Rollback what you did/change/deleted is relatively simple if you remember to back up the data you are manipulating.
