Informatica PowerCenter (legacy) vs. Talend Data Integration

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Informatica PowerCenter was data integration technology designed to form the foundation for data integration initiatives, application migration, or analytics. It is a legacy product.N/A
Talend Data Integration
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
The Talend Integration Suite, from Talend, is a set of tools for data integration.N/A
Pricing
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)Talend Data Integration
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)Talend 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 PowerCenter (legacy)Talend Data Integration
TrustRadius Insights
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)Talend 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 PowerCenter (legacy)Talend Data Integration
Data Source Connection
Comparison of Data Source Connection features of Product A and Product B
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)
8.5
Ratings
1% above category average
Talend Data Integration
9.5
Ratings
12% above category average
Connect to traditional data sources9.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Data Transformations
Comparison of Data Transformations features of Product A and Product B
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)
7.5
Ratings
8% below category average
Talend Data Integration
9.0
Ratings
10% above category average
Simple transformations8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Complex transformations7.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Data Modeling
Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)
8.2
Ratings
3% above category average
Talend Data Integration
9.0
Ratings
12% above category average
Data model creation9.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Metadata management8.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Business rules and workflow9.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Collaboration6.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Testing and debugging9.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Data Governance
Comparison of Data Governance features of Product A and Product B
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)
9.0
Ratings
10% above category average
Talend Data Integration
8.5
Ratings
5% above category average
Integration with data quality tools9.00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Integration with MDM tools9.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
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User Ratings
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)Talend Data Integration
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.4
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
6.6
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Informatica PowerCenter (legacy)Talend Data Integration
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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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 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.
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  • 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
  • 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.
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  • 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
Our team enjoys using Informatica and feels that it is one of the best ETL tools on the market.
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No answers on this topic
Usability
The tool is very flexible and will meet most, if not all, of your data transformation needs. It is an expert-level tool, so building your knowledge-base and user-base (and keeping that base healthy!) is very important. But it will pay off with strong data management and the ability to leverage that data in ways you haven’t thought of yet. Bottom line, data is money, and PowerCenter helps you monetize your data.
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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
Positives; - Multi-user development environment. - The speed of transformation. - Seamless integration with other Informatica products. Negatives; - There should be fewer windows, to maintain developers' focus while using. You probably need two 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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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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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
Basically the two solutions have, more or less, the same functions and features.The difference, for me, is that ThreatQuotient make more features over the security and I think is oriented to a SOC enviroments. InformaticaExchange Connectors is oriented to the quality, integration and distribution of the data in order to ensure the reliability and access of data from different sources, as well as the integration in a single repository of enterprise data (External/internal)
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Talend has many built-in components that reduce the development work. We were able to complete the project sooner than expected. Easy to on-board resources as it is straightforward to use. We can manage all the pipelines in the cloud with simple alerting. No major downtimes. Connectors to all new applications in the market.
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Return on Investment
  • PowerCenter has been instrumental in being the center of all data movement within the organization.
  • It has also provided a foundation for which re-usability and scalability are the focus.
  • Finding talent with experience and expertise in PowerCenter is far more likely due to its presence and market share.
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  • 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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