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78 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener noreferrer'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8.4 out of 100
Based on 78 reviews and ratings
7 Ratings
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Based on 7 reviews and ratings
Likelihood to Recommend
Informatica PowerCenter
PowerCenter is well equipped to handle large amounts of data movement in an organization with many disparate sources and a structured development team. It excels in enforcing enterprise development standards through things like metadata manager and the monitoring capabilities (as well as being able to design monitoring rules for everything from naming standards to design practices). It is especially well suited at handling flat-file data in addition to its many connectors and native support for just about any ANSI standard database. For large development teams or the desire to remain flexible at an enterprise scale, Powercenter is a top-tier solution.For small projects or even smaller development teams with mostly a single data source, expect frustration with being able to quickly test a solution as the design flow is very structured. It is also designed in a way that segregation of duties at a very high level can also cause small development teams to be counter-productive. Each step in the design process is a separate application, and although stitched together, is not without its problems. In order to design a simple mapping for example, you would first need a connection established to the source (example, ODBC) and keep in mind that it will automatically name the container according to how you named your connection. You would then open the designer tool, import a connection as a source, optionally check it in, create a target, optionally check it in as well, and design a transformation mapping. In order to test or run it, you will need to open a separate application (Workflow Manager) and create a workflow from your mapping, then create a session for that workflow and a workflow for those one or more sessions at which point you can test it. After running it, in order to observe, you then need to open a separate application (Monitor) to see what it is doing and how well. For a developer coming from something like SSIS, this can be daunting and cumbersome for building a simple POC and trying to test it (although from the inverse, building an enterprise scalable ETL solution from SSIS is its own challenge).
Senior Data Solutions Architect
Laser Spine InstituteHospital & Health Care, 501-1000 employees
Stitch, a Talend company
Ingestion tools make life easy to ingest new data sources. However, they are single tool in your tool box and treat them as such. They won't do your transformations nor do they (neither should they) have ability to define dependencies. They are built for making your ingestions mindlessly simple.

Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employeesFeature Rating Comparison
Data Source Connection
Informatica PowerCenter
8.5
Stitch, a Talend company
10.0
Connect to traditional data sources
Informatica PowerCenter
9.1
Stitch, a Talend company
10.0
Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL
Informatica PowerCenter
7.8
Stitch, a Talend company
10.0
Data Transformations
Informatica PowerCenter
9.0
Stitch, a Talend company
—
Simple transformations
Informatica PowerCenter
9.4
Stitch, a Talend company
—
Complex transformations
Informatica PowerCenter
8.6
Stitch, a Talend company
—
Data Modeling
Informatica PowerCenter
8.2
Stitch, a Talend company
8.0
Data model creation
Informatica PowerCenter
7.7
Stitch, a Talend company
—
Metadata management
Informatica PowerCenter
8.6
Stitch, a Talend company
—
Business rules and workflow
Informatica PowerCenter
9.0
Stitch, a Talend company
—
Collaboration
Informatica PowerCenter
8.0
Stitch, a Talend company
—
Testing and debugging
Informatica PowerCenter
7.8
Stitch, a Talend company
8.0
Data Governance
Informatica PowerCenter
8.5
Stitch, a Talend company
—
Integration with data quality tools
Informatica PowerCenter
8.3
Stitch, a Talend company
—
Integration with MDM tools
Informatica PowerCenter
8.6
Stitch, a Talend company
—
Pros
Informatica PowerCenter
- 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.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employeesStitch, a Talend company
- Stitch is good at replicating relational databases. It manages the conversion of data types and schemas, and it is capable of incremental replication.
- Stitch's UI makes it easy to configure which tables should be replicated, and how they should be replicated.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Research Company, 11-50 employeesCons
Informatica PowerCenter
- 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.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Insurance Company, 51-200 employeesStitch, a Talend company
- One of our integrations had to be re-synced on a regular basis. I still don't know why.

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Consumer Goods Company, 11-50 employeesLikelihood to Renew
Informatica PowerCenter
Informatica PowerCenter 10.0
Based on 4 answers
Our team enjoys using Informatica and feels that it is one of the best ETL tools on the market.
Director, Business Intelligence & Analytics
Georgetown UniversityHigher Education, 5001-10,000 employees
Stitch, a Talend company
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Usability
Informatica PowerCenter
Informatica PowerCenter 9.1
Based on 3 answers
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.
Data Quality Management Software Development Manager
Yapı KrediInformation Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees
Stitch, a Talend company
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Performance
Informatica PowerCenter
Informatica PowerCenter 9.6
Based on 3 answers
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

Verified User
Manager in Finance and Accounting
Consumer Goods Company, 10,001+ employeesStitch, a Talend company
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Informatica PowerCenter
Informatica PowerCenter 8.6
Based on 2 answers
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.

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Computer Software Company, 1001-5000 employeesStitch, a Talend company
Stitch, a Talend company 9.0
Based on 2 answers
I have had some troubles with one integration. It could be solved by doing a full re-sync which is not free. Every time I had to do it, I just sent them an email to tell them that I would do it and they did not charge for it.

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Consumer Goods Company, 11-50 employeesAlternatives Considered
Informatica PowerCenter
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.
Data Integration Data Quality Specialist
CARFAXInformation Services, 501-1000 employees
Stitch, a Talend company
We use both

Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology
Information Technology and Services Company, 501-1000 employeesReturn on Investment
Informatica PowerCenter
- 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.

Verified User
Director in Professional Services
Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employeesStitch, a Talend company
- Stitch manages replication of transactional datastores to our data warehouse. Our data and business intelligence teams need this data to be replicated. Stitch allows our data engineers to focus on our product.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Research Company, 11-50 employeesPricing Details
Informatica PowerCenter
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Stitch, a Talend company
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No