Informatica’s Intelligent Cloud Services (IICS) platform is a solution for synchronizing and integrating cloud and on-premise applications. It offers prebuilt connectors and actions between applications and programs, allowing for data transformation within the program, as well as case-specific services.
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Matillion
Score 6.8 out of 10
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Matillion is a productivity platform for data teams. Matillion's Data Productivity Cloud helps data teams – coders and non-coders alike – to move, transform, and orchestrate data pipelines with the goal of empowering teams to deliver quality data at a speed and scale that matches the business’s data ambitions. The vendor states enterprises including Cisco,
Billed directly via cloud marketplace on an hourly basis, with annual subscriptions available depending on the customer's cloud data warehouse provider.
Matillion offers the unique capability of digital platform connectors (API connectors) and special functionality for Snowflake (which is our primary database). Also various sources including AWS S3, sFTP and various databases connection. In Pricing, the matillion option has …
Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services and Matillion are both software designed to help organizations extract and transform business data. Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is an integration platform as a service built to help businesses synchronize cloud and on-premise applications. Matillion is a data integration tool designed to help businesses quickly pool together data from multiple sources such as SaaS applications. Matillion is most popular with mid-sized businesses, while Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services is most popular with large enterprises, perhaps due to its robust development tools.
Features
Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services and Matillion both allow businesses to transform and extract data, but they also have a few standout features that set them apart from each other.
Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services provides built in support for over 80 SaaS applications, making it a strong choice for businesses with a variety of applications to pull in data from. Additionally, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services provide support for a wide variety of regulatory compliance standards including HIPAA, Privacy Shield, and SOC 3. Lastly, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services allows for data sharing over the cloud so users can easily obtain and provide business data to other users.
Matillion provides robust compliance support specifically for GDPR compliance, making it a great software for organizations that do business in Europe. Additionally, Matillion provides a simple to use user interface, so users will require minimal training in order to get the most out of the software.
Limitations
Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services and Matillion provide data integration features for businesses, but they also have a few limitations that are important to consider.
Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services offers a number of compliancy features, but it doesn’t ensure GDPR compliance. For businesses that deal in Europe, this can be an important drawback. Additionally, Informatica Intelligent Cloud Services has a complex user interface, so users will require significant training to start using it optimally.
Matillion provides support for GDPR compliance, but not for other regulatory standards, so businesses with medical data may prefer other options. For businesses with many SaaS applications, Matillion provides around 40 native integrations, compared to Informatica Intelligent Cloud Service’s 80.
Pricing
Informatica Intelligence Cloud Services and Matillion do not provide exact pricing information. Businesses can reach out to the vendor for a quote depending on the exact needs of the organization.
Matillion pricing similarly depends on the needs of the business, but it starts as low as $1.37 an hour and offers support for Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Snowflake.
Informatica Cloud is a great tool for use when data must be formatted consistently. Once configured, it is very robust and reliable. It is also well-suited for an organization without a robust IT staff to maintain a full server infrastructure. It offers a cost-effective approach to high-quality data integration for even the largest organizations. Organizations without staff experienced in data analytics may find it challenging to take advantage of the more complex results of this tool.
It is very well suited for ETL on the cloud. Whenever there is something that can be accomplished with no code or little code, Matillion is a good tool. However, if your pipeline requires a lot of customizations, Matillion should be avoided.
Once the secure connection is established it’s quite easy to operate and create new jobs. The controls are simple, and we appreciate the fact there are not a lot of complex fine-tunings required. Navigation is also easy, and we enjoy the ability to open multiple tabs in the browser to work on multiple projects.
The monitoring functionality works well to help track the progress of the jobs, again, without too much complication. In a fast dev environment, speed is essential and we quickly seeing the status/progress of jobs as well as any errors if the jobs fail helps us maintain speed.
The web interface is a lot easier to interact with than the client/on-prem version. Putting much of the heavy lifting of interacting with the tool onto the shoulders of the browser makes it easier to keep multiple sessions open and get in/out quickly without having to VPN into the office.
We leveraged Matillion’s no-code principals to make data manipulation easy for our internal customers. People who don't know how to use SQL no longer need to. Everything in Matillion is self-explained with no or little coding.
We connected Matillion to our data warehouse to allow people to read raw data, transform it, then write results back to their sandbox databases. The drag and drop component design allowed customers to create complex data models at the speed of thought without any risk to production data.
With sharing capabilities between projects enabled, everyone was able to help each other when questions arose which instilled a strong sense of collaboration and community.
I think a non-CLI approach to installing and uninstalling python libraries would be nice. I mean, it isn't difficult to install a python library via Linux or CLI, but I imagine most companies don't feel comfortable allowing Matillion users to go on a virtual server and installing it themselves. Requirement.txt file for installing libraries would be simple, and maybe that could also be used to uninstall libraries as well......or maybe the library gets automatically downloaded if it is imported into a python script but the library doesn't exist.
Python Component is lacking very much in terms of UI. It would be unrealistic for me to suggest Matillion build its own EDI, but it would be nice if a python component could connect to a local IDE. Right now, if you want to write any decent length python code, you are going to be stuck copying and pasting your code from your local IDE.
It is also very difficult to debug in Matillion because you can't set breakpoints. Local IDE integration can resolve that.
I would like to have more templates to copy from for certain simplistic scenarios. For instance, a template for a job that fails which sends an AWS SNS with the Job name, component it failed on, and the error message. It wasn't as simple as I thought it would be to figure out and having to use a shared job for such circumstances can be painful because you have to export a bunch of variables.
There should be a drop down list for Global Matillion variables as it is difficult to remember at times.
With the current experience of Matillion, we are likely to renew with the current feature option but will also look for improvement in various areas including scalability and dependability. 1. Connectors: It offers various connectors option but isn't full proof which we will be looking forward as we grow. 2. Scalability: As usage increase, we want Matillion system to be more stable.
It has been easy to train new employees who don't have previous experience with Matillion. It is quite self-explanatory. There are quite a few things that can be done with Python, however, we have not really looked into this feature much but likely will do in the future. Mostly, it is drag and drop of components and environments can be set up so easy to set up connections as well.
I've never had trouble getting into contact with Informatica's support for technical help. I give it a nine because it does pretty well for mid to enterprise-scale workflows.
Overall, I've found Matillion to be responsive and considerate. I feel like they value us as a customer even when I know they have customers who spend more on the product than we do. That speaks to a motive higher than money. They want to make a good product and a good experience for their customers. If I have any complaint, it's that support sometimes feels community-oriented. It isn't always immediately clear to me that my support requests are going to a support engineer and not to the community at large. Usually, though, after a bit of conversation, it's clear that Matillion is watching and responding. And responses are generally quick in coming.
First, the wizard is easy to use making the learning curve for simple ETL tasks nice. Second, since Informatica is mature there are a good variety of connectors available. Finally, we have driven some fairly complex ETL solutions using only the cloud.
Matillion ran circles around Stitch and Striim both in functionality, setup, and performance. There was no real comparison. Fivetran massively outperforms Matillion in pretty much every facet of the production from setup, maintenance, visibility, and usability. It already has the ability to connect any data source to a destination regardless of database type. Why we chose Matillion over Fivetran is that, for our current needs, Matillion provides us with the functionality that we need and a much more competitive price for a smaller company.
I have been able to connect Matillion to AWS Aurora Databases, MySQL databases, Rest APIs, Files in AWS S3, etc. Being able to load all of that disparate data into one datalake has made data mining and reporting a lot simpler. I wish everything could be implemented as easily as Matillion.
