Skip to main content
TrustRadius
SolarWinds Task Factory

SolarWinds Task Factory

Overview

What is SolarWinds Task Factory?

According to the vendor, SolarWinds Task Factory saves time managing tedious ELT/ETL tasks with high-performing SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) components that can be used within the Visual Studio environment to connect to nearly any data source. Task Factory’s components…

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Upsert Component: Highly praised for its simplicity and ease of use, the Upsert component in Task Factory has been mentioned by several …
Continue reading

Upgrade to Upsert

10 out of 10
April 30, 2020
Incentivized
Our prima facie need was to increase the speed for loading our data warehouses. We used SSIS, and needed an easy way to convert to bulk …
Continue reading

Task Factory Review

8 out of 10
March 22, 2020
Incentivized
Our Data Integration team uses Task Factory as a 3rd-party plugin tool to support Microsoft SSIS packages. Task Factory makes our job …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 5 features
  • Complex transformations (35)
    9.6
    96%
  • Connect to traditional data sources (40)
    9.4
    94%
  • Simple transformations (39)
    8.7
    87%
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

Task Factory

1,245 (annual subscription license)

On Premise
per server

Task Factory Azure Data Factory

1,495 (annual subscription license)

On Premise
per ADF node

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.sentryone.com/products/task…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Return to navigation

Features

Data Source Connection

Ability to connect to multiple data sources

9.4
Avg 8.3

Data Transformations

Data transformations include calculations, search and replace, data normalization and data parsing

9.1
Avg 8.4

Data Governance

Data governance is the practise of implementing policies defining effective use of an organization's data assets

9.4
Avg 8.2
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is SolarWinds Task Factory?

According to the vendor, SolarWinds Task Factory saves time managing tedious ELT/ETL tasks with high-performing SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) components that can be used within the Visual Studio environment to connect to nearly any data source. Task Factory’s components and tasks have been optimized to ensure fast performance of data-centric applications, and the user can run Task Factory on an Azure-SSIS Integration Runtime (IR) with Task Factory Azure Data Factory edition.

SolarWinds Task Factory Features

Data Source Connection Features

  • Supported: Connect to traditional data sources

Data Transformations Features

  • Supported: Simple transformations
  • Supported: Complex transformations

Data Governance Features

  • Supported: Integration with data quality tools
  • Supported: Integration with MDM tools

SolarWinds Task Factory Screenshots

Screenshot of Salesforce.com SourceScreenshot of Dimension Merge SCD TransformScreenshot of Upsert DestinationScreenshot of REST Source

SolarWinds Task Factory Integrations

SolarWinds Task Factory Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows
Mobile ApplicationNo

SolarWinds Task Factory Downloadables

Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(64)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Upsert Component: Highly praised for its simplicity and ease of use, the Upsert component in Task Factory has been mentioned by several users as a valuable feature. Users appreciate that with just a few clicks, they can perform merge operations without the complexities of writing code.

Extended Functionality: Many users find Task Factory to be highly beneficial due to its ability to extend the functionality of native SSIS components. This aspect allows them to work with a wider range of data sources and perform tasks that would otherwise be challenging with only native components.

Seamless Integration: The seamless integration capabilities of Task Factory have been highlighted by users. They mention specific use cases such as integrating with partners' Secure FTP sites, working with Excel, and sending out emails using partners' SMTP servers. Users appreciate how Task Factory simplifies these tasks and saves them significant time.

Challenging execution against non-licensed servers: Some users have found it challenging to execute packages against servers that do not have proper licenses, which has required them to search for alternative solutions or workarounds.

Lack of detailed logging for errors: Users have expressed a strong desire for more comprehensive and detailed logging capabilities when components encounter errors. This would enable better troubleshooting and analysis of issues during package execution.

Lack of notifications for software updates: Several users have mentioned that they were not notified or alerted when new versions of the software became available. This lack of notification caused them to miss out on important updates and improvements to the product.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-18 of 18)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Task Factory is used to support our SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) needs. SSIS has many tasks built in but we have found they fall short of our needs and Task Factory fills that gap for us. The components provided are well designed and easy to configure for the package to use and allow parameters to be configured for ease of use across environments.
  • The SFTP task is particularly helpful with proxy capabilities and setup with environment variables.
  • The RestAPI task is something new that we have found helpful now.
  • The latest UpSert task has also been a great addition.
  • I thought it needed to improve the UpSert task to include delete capabilities but was informed it is present. Just might be useful to be more apparent to an infrequent user.
One task we use with every package is the Advanced Email task, although simple and used primarily for our monitoring of package success, it is helpful and simple to use. Only downside as with any product is it does require some maintenance and has had the occasional blip of an update breaking an existing functionality.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using Task Factory to better standardize our ETL and to reduce the number of script tasks leveraged. It is primarily used for data flow and control flow tasks, although some connections are used as well. This is used as a standard, centralized tool within IT, along with other 3rd party SSIS tools.
  • Email notifications.
  • File management.
  • User defined settings for external package calls.
  • Better software update methodology.
Being able to easily call packages from other projects is the biggest win. Having a single process to handle all child calls is a big win over using the standard component for calls within a project, and some other mechanism (via SQL stored procedure calls and/or SQL agent calls) for packages not within the same project.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Task Factory within our team. We have a need to ensure efficient ETL design to drive our high-performing data-centric application. Task Factory helps us reduce development time spent programming custom SSIS tasks, gives us components and tasks that are optimized to perform well in production, and a broad array of connections to various data platforms.
  • One-click Auditing Feature. Simply push a button, and all of your SSIS packages now have detailed auditing built-in, including the ability to watch it in real-time.
  • Wide variety of connections. If you need to connect to a common data source, Task factory will have what you need. No need to roll your own anymore.
  • The Upsert Component. Task Factory has a simple and FAST way to do an insert or update with new row data. It just works and works well.
  • SCD component could be a little more intuitive.
  • The help documents could be more detailed and current with what is actually released.
You should strongly consider Task Factory if you are a Microsoft Data platform shop. It really rounds out SSIS. If you don't know what SSIS is, then this is the wrong product for you.
April 28, 2020

Love Task Factory!

Steven Gockley, MBA, MCSA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are heavy SQL Server Integration Services shop. There are a number of instances where we were faced with hand-coding solutions that would take hours or days to implement, but with Task Factory we were able to do it in seconds. We have a large number of highly visible, customer-facing processes that depend on Task Factory, and it has been very reliable and easy to use.
  • Our first use case was integrating with our Partners' Secure FTP Sites. Task Factory did this seamlessly.
  • Our second use case involved Excel. We have multiple groups that use Excel to monitor their processes, and using the Excel refresh task made this very quick and simple.
  • Our third use case was for SMTP. The basic SMTP did not give us enough control out of the box that we needed. We send out E-mails on behalf of our partners using their SMTP servers, so being able to change those connections effortlessly using this task was a huge time saver.
  • Not sure. I have not run into an instance where their transform didn't provide what I needed more easily than other solutions.
We use Task Factory a lot for our report automation. We have several use cases where we send out thousands of reports on a schedule to certain groups of customers, and Task Factory allows us to easily get files and move them via SFTP, FTP, or Email very easily. We have used it in our data warehouse as well, but not as heavily.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Usage: We are using Task Factory inside the IT department to enhance the capabilities of SSIS (SQL Server Integration services).

Business problem: Your team can keep using SSIS and tackle data problems they could not resolve before (read from different sources without any code and do data upsert in one component).
  • Read from APIs without code.
  • Upset mechanism.
  • Can be longer to debug.
  • Need one license for dev servers.
Well suited:
  • When the capabilities of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) are not enough for you.
  • When you want to extract data from web sources without writing some code.
Not Well suited:
  • If you have separate servers for all your environments (that will cost you more money).
  • If your team does not know SSIS enough (the tool can be difficult to debug).
Karl Blacquière | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Task Factory is used by the BI and the Integration Department. It helps us to standardize the way we are extracting and transforming data into our data warehouse and also the way we are connecting different applications (CRM and ERP).
  • The Slowly Changing Dimension Component saves us a huge amount if time compared to the native SSIS component.
  • JSON Transform is really useful to convert record and send it to rest API.
  • The advanced derived columns allow us to use really cool functions that are not available in the regular transforms.
  • We were disappointed that the Marketto Connector has been retired from the components.
  • We had a problem integrating Task Factory with LegiTest (license problem). It took a lot of time for Sentry to find and fix this problem
I think Task Factory is really helpful when building regular ETL in SSIS. IT helped us save time by replacing the native SSIS component with a more advanced one. However, there are some cases where TF was not performing well when the keys are GUID. We had to remove some TF components in that case.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Task Factory is being used to integrate to a number of external organisations and data sources so it can be loaded into our organisations data warehouse. It helps make the integrations through SSIS very easy and simple using Task Factory's connectors. The main connector we are using it for is the Salesforce ones which are simple and effective.
  • Easy to install.
  • Easy to use.
  • Great support if stuck.
  • New connectors are not released very often.
  • Updating the connectors is not an easy task.
  • Troubleshooting a problem can be difficult.
Task Factory is well suited for integration with Salesforce, REST APIs and other offline sources.
Rather than programme your own connectors, the Task Factory connectors will make it simple and easy to download and parse data from JSON/XML into a database or table.

Task Factory is less suited for custom/very secure API connections especially if they require hashing the connection string each time.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Task Factory is used in the IT department only. It addresses the need for data connections and transformations that are not included in the base SQL Server Integrations Services system.
  • Tasks are more automated than having to create them by hand.
  • Support is great either in forum settings or direct contact with support.
  • Maybe ensuring that all assemblies are deleted when having to install Task Factory on the server.
For the tasks available in Task Factory, it does them very well. The upsert task is ideal for my uses. I do wish that there was some sort of delete or mark as delete feature when loading data into a data warehouse. We don't run Enterprise Edition of SQL Server so we don't have the change data capture feature.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our Business and Application Reporting team is using this tool. We are using this to take the data from our Salesforce org into a data warehouse. Once the data is there we use it to create Microsoft Power BI reports. Also we use Task Factory to upsert data into Salesforce for any data migration projects. This has solved a numerous amount of issues regarding moving Salesforce data in and out of our data warehouse and other ETL.
  • Upsert Salesforce data.
  • It is simple to use.
  • Very straightforward upgrade process.
  • Continually getting new features that are useful.
  • More drag and drop interfacing.
  • Modernize the UI.
Works great for Salesforce. I can take any flat file or other source and upsert to Salesforce. I think the other way around is also well done. I would like to see a better way to create the relationship between records, but otherwise well done. It has always finished the tasks we need it to.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I am testing Task Factory features and functionality to determine if it's a good fit for our organization. It is currently not widely implemented across the business, but there is potential for it if the POC proves viable. I am primarily looking at Task Factory to replace cumbersome, manual API calls and to streamline data flow from 3rd parties into our internal data warehouses.
  • Good SSIS integration with other packages and processes.
  • Easy to configure 3rd party account logins, credentials, etc.
  • Intuitive interfaces.
  • The user-experience could be a little more intuitive. Struggled a bit to put all the pieces together the right way in order to get the data processed the way I needed.
Task Factory seems like it would be great for moving data out of our third-party systems and into our own data warehouse where it can be combined with our other mission-critical data. We are really seeking a way in which we can merge our users' front-end behavior and actions with back-end outcomes. Task Factory seems suited to the task.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Task Factory in our daily ETL processes. These processes are built and maintained by the Business Intelligence department
  • The task to call another package in a different solution
  • Advanced lookup and other tasks
  • Improvement can be achieved when new releases are tested better. We had a few times that our ETL stopped when implementing a new release.
When having a complex ETL environment and calling packages in different solutions, it's the only software we found that works according to expectations.
August 19, 2019

Task Factory Delivers!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used for data ETL and interfacing between databases and packages.
  • Data validation
  • Data cleaning
  • Quickly building interfaces between databases, non-database sources, and packages.
  • Would like to see more detailed documentation and examples.
Well suited for building complex interfaces.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used by the BI department. Simplifies some file & SQL related transformations.
  • File related tasks.
  • PGP tasks.
  • Web related tasks.
  • Create a snowflake transform - source & destination.
  • simplify SCD transform - too many options.
Good for basic & advanced transforms.
Not so good to keep things updated.
Mickeal Davis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Task Factory is used within our Business Systems team for the development of SSIS packages for ETLs into our data warehouse and other applications.
It speeds up development time by adding very useful transforms that are easier to use than the standard Microsoft transforms as well. It makes debugging and development faster.
  • Expression editor is by far better than that in standard SSRS.
  • The SharePoint destination and source is much easier to use than standard SSRS.
  • The slowly changing dimension transform is very easy to use and adds a level of capability that gives a better outcome.
  • More worked examples in the help.
Managing slowly changing type 2 dimensions along with auditing information is best done with the SCD Transform.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We mainly use Task Factory to connect to third-party data source via REST. We were looking for a third-party connector of SSIS for Google Analytics in 2018. After evaluating a couple of vendors, we purchased Task Factory. It is mainly used by the Business Reporting Analytics team for ETL purposes.
  • Retrieve data from various REST sources
  • Data cleansing
  • Data importing
  • Offer more options in UI for different configurations of REST sources
  • More details in documents
  • It appears that REST connectors do not work well with Okta in place.
A set of flexible components for SSIS for users who have needs for various data sources. With Task Factory, we were able to retrieve Google Analytic data without one line of coding.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Task Factory to fill in the missing pieces in the SSIS toolbox.
  • By filling in the blanks where SSIS doesn't do everything it needs to do, Task Factory makes SSIS a truly useful ETL tool.
  • Task Factory is intuitive and very easy to roll out.
  • Versus the cost of paying for other tools or expensive custom development work, Task Factory is a deal.
  • No complaints whatsoever about Task Factory. It does everything we expect it to do and performs well.
I highly recommend Task Factory as a low-cost, high-value addition to the SSIS toolbox.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Task Factory was selected for two primary reasons. First and foremost, because of the extensive library of functions it makes available in SSIS to ease the SSIS programmer's job of importing and cleansing data. Second, because of the logging and notification features that it makes available which allow us to easily track the record counts of data we imported and easily notify us if there are issues with the execution of an SSIS process. Task Factory is used by our IT department, but we import data from 15-20 State agencies, so it indirectly affects many of our processes.
  • Better data cleansing and validation functions than are available in basic SSIS.
  • Better database insert and update functions than in SSIS.
  • Ease of use of functions provided.
  • Re-introduce the prior feature to allow a user to copy or move SSIS variables from one package or scope to another.
  • Provide a better upgrade path from one version of the product to another higher version. Our upgrade from 2008 to 2016 was quite complex and it seemed as though we might have been the first such upgrade Pragmatic Works had encountered.
I would definitely recommend the product for any SSIS project. We saw its benefits from the very beginning, even when we had only a few SSIS packages. We are now up to over 120 SSIS packages and process files from over 20 sources on a regular basis, including weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually. We cleanse the data and use it to build data warehouses and SSAS cubes for consumption by numerous State agencies.
March 21, 2017

Task Factory Review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Task Factory is implemented by our database development and BI teams for use in supporting ETL requests from all departments within the organization. Task Factory has streamlined the process of loading data from many disparate data sources including flat files, Excel, XML, other database and cloud platforms. What could take many hours to write in SQL or to derive in native Microsoft SSIS components now takes as little as a few minutes to implement with Task Factory.
  • 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.
  • Limited to only running on a licensed server or in BIDS. We have development servers that require licensing as well, but I've had to get creative to be able to execute packages against non-licensed servers.
  • Wish the logging was more detailed when components error.
  • Not alerted when a new version is available.
The single most used component in our Task Factory toolbelt is the Upsert component. The time this component has saved our developers alone paid for the product in the first few months. If you've ever attempted to use the native SSIS components to do upserts, or gone the route of writing your own upsert/merge statements, you'll appreciate this component. Another component that helps in the debugging stage is the Terminator Destination component. This component allows you to test your source inside a Data Flow without the need to having a destination.
We have had our challenges with the Salesforce connection. It does not seem to process as efficiently as we'd like.

Return to navigation