informatica-powercenter-vs-talend-data-integration

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 Its UI is less attractive and out-of-date, and some say plenty of training is required to get up and running.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.