Informatica PowerCenter vs. Talend Data Integration

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Informatica PowerCenter
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Informatica PowerCenter is a metadata driven data integration technology designed to form the foundation for data integration initiatives, including analytics and data warehousing, application migration, or consolidation and data governance.N/A
Talend Data Integration
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
The Talend Integration Suite, from Talend, is a set of tools for data integration.N/A
Pricing
Informatica PowerCenterTalend Data Integration
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Informatica PowerCenterTalend Data Integration
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Informatica PowerCenterTalend Data Integration
Considered Both Products
Informatica PowerCenter
Chose Informatica PowerCenter
Informatica PowerCenter is highly flexible and scalable for different types of data and it has any inbuilt function to transform our data into the meta data structure. Some of the tool sets such as TDM, is good in some ways but need EBF more than often when running into any …
Chose Informatica PowerCenter
PowerCenter is simply so robust and refined that most other apps cannot do as much as it can. Even Informatica’s own Cloud version is so anemic as to not even compare against it. While from that perspective it feels bloated with too much to navigate through, many of those …
Talend Data Integration
Chose Talend Data Integration
Data Preparation is something which can improved and connectivity with more visualization tools are few factors which can be improved.
As Talend Data Integration becomes more cloud focused, the gap in features / functionality widens between on-premise functionality and the …
Top Pros
Top Cons
TrustRadius Insights
Informatica PowerCenterTalend Data Integration
Highlights

TrustRadius
Research Team Insight
Published

Informatica PowerCenter and Talend Data Integration are directly competing ETL tools supporting data integration. Talend aims to help users create a single source of truth for all their data no matter where it resides. PowerCenter is a metadata-based solution designed to serve as the foundation of data integration initiatives, supporting projects with accurate, valid data. Both solutions tend to be deployed in larger enterprises where data is generated by or resides in disparate applications and systems and that benefit most from operational analytics.

Features

Users of Talend Data Integration and Informatica PowerCenter describe a number of benefits to deploying either solution in the enterprise.

Talend Data Integration has an easy to understand and use interface. Users speak highly of its drag-and-drop process builder, and prebuilt components that save time and effort that might have been spent coding from scratch. Due to wide and general adoption, its active community of users presents solutions for many common issues, preventing the need for technical support for those getting started.

Informatica PowerCenter is known for its enterprise-readiness.It supports multi-user, multi-divisional environments well, as well as integrating data from disparate or legacy systems with multifarious data connectors.  PowerCenter also provides and supports many data transformation techniques. It is considered a relatively powerful and established ETL tool.

Limitations

Users give several reasons PowerCenter and Talend Data Integration might not represent the best solution for a particular data integration initiative.

While Talend Data Integration offers an open source free version, the open-source version is considered not a particularly effective tool for almost any project. Much of what users like about Talend is available on the licensed version only, which some users say is relatively expensive. Also, users say version management is a challenge, and its IDE is slow and its memory management is allegedly poor.

In contrast, Informatica PowerCenter lacks the ease of use of Talend. Its UI is less attractive and out-of-date, and some say plenty of training is required to get up and running. While a powerful ETL option, PowerCenter is not cheap, and Informatica offers no free or open source version at all, putting it out of reach of many users. Aside from its dated UI, Informatica PowerCenter also lacks compelling reporting and visualizations. 

Pricing

As stated, Talend Data Integration has a free and open source version. PowerCenter does not. Informatica PowerCenter For Windows (PAYG) is available from the vendor via AWS for $3.50 per hour or $24,528 per year, not counting AWS associated costs. A Microsoft Azure deployment is also available, with pricing by quote from the vendor. On-premise licensing for PowerCenter is undisclosed, and discussable directly with Informatica.

Talend Data Integration licensing is $1,170 USD per user monthly, or $12,000 USD per user annually, with similar pricing for cloud or on-prem deployments. If a user wants to use only the Talend Data Pipeline designer, a design tool used to prepare data for analytics projects that is included in Talend Data Integration deployments, is also available standalone via usage based hourly pricing.

Features
Informatica PowerCenterTalend Data Integration
Data Source Connection
Comparison of Data Source Connection features of Product A and Product B
Informatica PowerCenter
8.5
18 Ratings
3% above category average
Talend Data Integration
8.2
9 Ratings
0% below category average
Connect to traditional data sources9.018 Ratings8.99 Ratings
Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL8.014 Ratings7.68 Ratings
Data Transformations
Comparison of Data Transformations features of Product A and Product B
Informatica PowerCenter
7.5
18 Ratings
11% below category average
Talend Data Integration
8.9
9 Ratings
6% above category average
Simple transformations8.018 Ratings8.99 Ratings
Complex transformations7.018 Ratings8.99 Ratings
Data Modeling
Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
Informatica PowerCenter
8.2
18 Ratings
0% above category average
Talend Data Integration
7.9
9 Ratings
3% below category average
Data model creation9.015 Ratings7.28 Ratings
Metadata management8.016 Ratings8.08 Ratings
Business rules and workflow9.018 Ratings8.87 Ratings
Collaboration6.116 Ratings5.58 Ratings
Testing and debugging9.017 Ratings8.89 Ratings
Data Governance
Comparison of Data Governance features of Product A and Product B
Informatica PowerCenter
9.0
15 Ratings
9% above category average
Talend Data Integration
7.8
8 Ratings
5% below category average
Integration with data quality tools9.015 Ratings7.68 Ratings
Integration with MDM tools9.013 Ratings8.08 Ratings
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User Ratings
Informatica PowerCenterTalend Data Integration
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(21 ratings)
8.3
(18 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(3 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.4
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(2 ratings)
6.6
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
Informatica PowerCenterTalend Data Integration
Likelihood to Recommend
Informatica
1.- Scenaries with poor sources of data is not recomended (Very bad ROI). The solution is for medium-big enterprises with a lot of sources of data and users. 2.- Bank and finance enviroment to integrate differente data form trading, Regulatory reports, decisions makers, fraud and financial crimes because in this kind of scenary the quality of data is the base of the business. 3.- Departments of development and test of applications in enterprises because you can design enviroments, out of the production systems, to development and test the new API's or updateds made.
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Qlik
The same way you design data integration job can be used to design services. It is easy to enhance by custom components and can adapt to all requirements. Talend Data Integration connects to [a] multitude of data sources and streaming service. Very easy interface to design complex applications without spending much time on coding. Easy to learn and master. Talend constantly strives to better itself by adding more features and functionalities.
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Pros
Informatica
  • Informatica Powercenter is an innovative software that works with ETL-type data integration. Connectivity to almost all the database systems.
  • Great documentation and customer support.
  • It has a various solution to address data quality issues. data masking, data virtualization. It has various supporting tools or MDM, IDQ, Analyst, BigData which can be used to analyze data and correct it.
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Qlik
  • We used Talend to ETLing the data from myriad sources such Oracle Database, Clarify, Salesforce, Sugar CRM, SQL DB, MQ, Stibo Step, FTP, Netezza, and Files.
  • We leverage Talend transformation capabilities for stitching the data , unions and join
  • We successfully created the final unified set that can be used by business
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Cons
Informatica
  • 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.
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Qlik
  • Pricing for sure can be the area for improvement.
  • Real time processing is slow as compared to other tools like Abinitio.
  • While developing batches, it crashes a lot. It may be the issue with me, but I wanted to highlight it.
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Likelihood to Renew
Informatica
Our team enjoys using Informatica and feels that it is one of the best ETL tools on the market.
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Qlik
No answers on this topic
Usability
Informatica
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.
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Qlik
We use Talend Data Integration day in and day out. It is the best and easiest tool to jump on to and use. We can build a basic integration super-fast. We could build basic integrations as fast as within the hour. It is also easy to build transformations and use Java to perform some operations.
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Performance
Informatica
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
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Qlik
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Informatica
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.
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Qlik
Good support, specially when it relates to PROD environment. The support team has access to the product development team. Things are internally escalated to development team if there is a bug encountered. This helps the customer to get quick fix or patch designed for problem exceptions. I have also seen support showing their willingness to help develop custom connector for a newly available cloud based big data solution
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Alternatives Considered
Informatica
While Talend offers a much more comfortable interface to work with, Informatica's forte is performance. And on that front, Informatica Enterprise Data Integration certainly leaves Talend in the dust. For a more back-end-centric use case, Informatica is certainly the ETL tool of choice. On the other hand, if business users would be using the tool, then Talend would be the preferred tool.
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Qlik
In comparison with the other ETLs I used, Talend is more flexible than Data Services (where you cannot create complex commands). It is similar to Datastage speaking about commands and interfaces. It is more user-friendly than ODI, which has a metadata point of view on its own, while Talend is more classic. It has both on-prem and cloud approaches, while Matillion is only cloud-based.
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Return on Investment
Informatica
  • 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.
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Qlik
  • It’s only been a positive RoI with Talend given we’ve interfaced large datasets between critical on-Prem and cloud-native apps to efficiently run our business operations.
  • 40K+ plots data, covering 1K+ crop varieties.
  • 3K+ Customer & their credit data, 3K+ product inventory & pricing.
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