Informatica PowerCenter vs Matillion

Informatica Powercenter is the centerpiece of our overall enterprise data warehouse strategy. It's a critical enablement to ensure we can feed in multiple data stream and transform them into digestible data within our data warehouse. With its flexible capabilities and API availability, we were able to feed in industry standard data format as well as home grown data structure. Overall, we are very pleased with their capability and contribution to our data warehouse strategy.

I always suggest Matillion for organizations that do not want to spend money and time developing their own ETL tool, Matillion is a mature one and meet all requirements about it. It is important to check if you have any edge case and have a look if it is covered by Matillion or not.

• 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.

• Extremely user-friendly workflow orchestration between multiple languages such as SQL, Python, bash, and various API connectors
• Salesforce connectors to pull and push data between systems save us a ton of time
• Matillion Exchange workflows allow for easy sharing of templated best practice transformation jobs with ease
• Very responsive support

• There are too many ways to perform the same or similar functions which in turn makes it challenging to trace what a workflow is doing and at which point (ex. sessions can be designed as static or re-usable and the override can occur at the session or workflow, or both which can be counter productive and confusing when troubleshooting).
• The power in structured design is a double edged sword. Simple tasks for a POC can become cumbersome. Ex. if you want to move some data to test a process, you first have to create your sources by importing them which means an ODBC connection or similar will need to be configured, you in turn have to develop your targets and all of the essential building blocks before being able to begin actual development. While I am on sources and targets, I think of a table definition as just that and find it counter intuitive to have to design a table as both a source and target and manage them as different objects. It would be more intuitive to have a table definition and its source/target properties defined by where you drag and drop it in the mapping.
• There are no checkpoints or data viewer type functions without designing an entire mapping and workflow. If you would like to simply run a job up to a point and check the throughput, an entire mapping needs to be completed and you would workaround this by creating a flat file target.

• Passing variables between jobs (orchestration or transformation) feels a bit clunky. It can also be frustrating that you can't pass a variable back up to the calling orchestration job, you can only pass it down to child jobs.
• It would be great to have some kind of debug mode, through which you're able to 'step through' the various tasks in an orchestration/transformation job.
• Matillion's generic API functionality is difficult to understand. Things like handling pagination and rate limiting are complex. Although I understand improvements have been made in recent versions.

Our team enjoys using Informatica and feels that it is one of the best ETL tools on the market.

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.

Positives; - Multi User Development Environment - Speed of transformation - Seamless integration between other Informatica products. Negatives; - There should be less windows to maintain developers' focus while using. You probably need 2 big monitors when you start development with Informatica Power Center. - Oracle Analytical functions should be natively used. - E-LT support as well as ETL support.

Pretty good UI, especially for a completely web-based system. Source control integration is a bit clunky at times, but overall makes code versioning and branching much more simple, since it's largely within the same context as the rest of the code. Finding some core settings can be difficult - they're just not where one would expect them to be.

PowerCenter is robust and fast, and it does a great job meeting all the needs, not just the most commercially vocal needs. In the hands of an expert power user, you can accomplish almost anything with your data. It is not for new users or intermittent users-- for that the Cloud version is a better fit. Be prepared for costly connectors (priced differently for each source or destination you are working with), and just be planful of your projects so you are not paying for connectors you no longer need or want

Informatica power center is a leader of the pack of ETL tools and has some great abilities that make it stand out from other ETL tools. It has been a great partner to its clients over a long time so it's definitely dependable. With all the great things about Informatica, it has a bit of tech burden that should be addressed to make it more nimble, reduce the learning curve for new developers, provide better connectivity with visualization tools.

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.

Not really a part of the implementation to give fare insight.

PowerCenter is the industry leader when it comes to interfacing with multiple source and target systems. The graphical interface increases employee productivity while reducing human resource expenditures and training requirements. These other tools offer some similar capabilities, but lack the range and depth when compared with the PowerCenter platform.

We used Airflow for a year before switching to Matillion. We switched to Matillion because the Airflow servers were not stable, and we didn't have any in-house expertise that could manage the Linux OS which Airflow is built on. We were constantly frustrated by the fact that we had to wait for a consultant whenever we wanted to manage one of the servers, or if something was down we had to wait for someone to fix it. Also, Airflow doesn't have a GUI that is drag and drop. It is a lot more work to manage the flow of the scripts in Airflow, and requires a lot more explanation, especially for an entry level data engineer. There is a lot more coding in Airflow, which is fine if you are a good coder. However, Matillion offers a bigger tool set for those who just want to focus on building an ETL pipeline, and don't care to do a lot of coding.

The product scales great for small to medium size teams or groups. For groups larger it becomes more challenging and requires more individual instances depending on the volume of running jobs and concurrent users - it handles 10's of concurrent users and jobs very well but much larger than that would be extremely difficult on the largest instance or cluster that is available at this time.

• The data pipeline automation capability of Informatica means that few resources are needed to pre-process the data that ultimately resides in a Data Warehouse. Once a workflow is implemented, manual intervention is not needed.
• PowerCenter did require more resources and time for installation and configuration than was expected/planned for.
• The lack of or minimal support of unstructured data means that newer sources of dynamic/changing data cannot be easily processed/transformed through PowerCenter workflows.

• Matillion had had a positive impact on our ability to scale up our ETL process without increasing our headcount. We've been able to double the number of jobs we have in the last year.
• A positive impact on the amount of time we need to investigate failures. Coming from other tools that had high rates of failures (say 2 jobs failing a week), we have not seen as many technical failures from Matillion. This reduces the number of resources we focus on tracking down failures, fixing, and re-running jobs by 25%.