Navicat vs. SolarWinds Task Factory

Navicat Premium is a very well-rounded tool with a reasonable licensing fee given its feature set. It is primarily suited for technical resources who must work with a variety of different database systems, but who may not be database or command line tool wizards. However, its query building and job batch scheduling feature support end-users as they build competency, and it continues to hold its value even as users outgrow their training wheels. Navicat is probably not so appropriate for DBAs and others for whom database development and management is already a career path; these folks have their preferred toolsets, both vendor-supplied and homegrown, and they might consider the additional licensing cost to outweigh the value they'd personally get out of Navicat.

Incentivized

Since I started working with this great tool all data analysis programs have been running effectively. Implementation of projects and tasks have been effective and reliable. Data collected from each department gives us working plan on better management of various programs. The Dimension Merge SCD Transform helps us to load large volumes of data within a short period of time.

Incentivized

• Really helpful auto-completion.
• Can connect to multiple (different) database types simultaneously.
• Can generate some really impressive charts.
• The new data dictionary tool is great!

• The single most beneficial component to Task Factory is the Upsert component. If you're familiar with writing MERGE statements in T-SQL, you'll appreciate the Upsert component. Drag the component into your Data Flow and a few clicks later you have a MERGE without the code complexities.
• Where some native SSIS components leave you wanting more, Task Factory extends on many of these components as well as support for data sources not native to SSIS components.
• The number of extra components that come in the Task Factory tool kit will expand your tool belt to do just about anything you need or want to accomplish in SSIS.

Incentivized

• Remote deploy databases
• Clone databases

Incentivized

• It was built by Pragmatic Works who sold it to SentryOne and now Solar Winds, concerned about future support. SolarWinds is discontinuing support for related products such as BiXpress.
• Had issues with connecting to certain versions of SQL Server - would fail when deploying one package - had to deploy the entire solutions.
• Occasional random failures observed with the Filter tranform.

Incentivized

Task Factory has become a key product for our use of doing ETL work in SSIS. Their custom SSIS components allow us to work simply on the data engineering side of things. We can ignore the lower level work needed to connect to disparate data sources. This allows us to work faster and provide more value to the business

Incentivized

There is quite a lot to learn because Navicat Premium is a very comprehensive database management and development tool, but it's User Interface is intuitive enough to pick up fairly quickly. I have also referred to the documentation on occasion, and can attest that it is quite good. I feel that it works best on a large monitor, but that's fairly common for this sort of software.

Compared to some of the other transformations I have worked with, it really is pretty simple for the type of functionality you get

Incentivized

Very robust online community and well as excellent support staff. Easy to follow video tutorials. Detailed sample configurations are provided with guided walk-throughs via remote classroom instruction. Very fast response from support staff. No internal hires were necessary for support as vendor support staff fully met all technical expertise. 24/7 incident reporting and tracking is great.

Incentivized

Overall, the best vendor we currently have on the data side of the house. No issues, issues are resolved very quickly and upgrades go without any issues.

Incentivized

Overall it went smoothly. Had a couple of gotchas with licensing and upgrading but nothing that really stopped us.

Incentivized

Navicat allows for easier querying of data while still allowing for visualization and modeling

ZappySys is an alternative provider that we tested. However, we found the ease of use, set up and installation to be much simplier and quicker using Task Factory. ZappySys has a number of the same connectors but are more difficult to setup and the GUI is not as intuitive and simple to use.

Incentivized

• Assisting new employees with understanding our DB
• Reduce debugging and testing time with being able to visualize data/queries
• Allowing non-SQL users to execute queries to get real-time data.

Incentivized

• We were able to support our developers with Task Factory features and reduce the development time by 40%.
• Recently Task Factory has changed their pricing module and it seems to be pretty costly for our process. Our business team has started to evaluate whether this is worth it going forward.

Incentivized