Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud vs. SnapLogic

Informatica Cloud is an excellent tool for freeing up trapped data in your internal systems and exporting it into a cloud data warehouse or SQL container. Especially if you have any internal SQL query generators that allow you to copy and paste into the Source setup. For example, we use Business Objects internally, and you can build out the query you need inside the firewall with that, then paste it into the query within Informatica Cloud while establishing the Source connection. This way you are not writing all your source parameters by hand, cutting new jobs setup time by 50%. Where Cloud will not suit you well is if you need significant visibility to the health of the system from a tracking, monitoring or error handling standpoint. Cloud will tell you it failed, maybe give you an example error, but has no further troubleshooting or diagnostic assistance to offer.

Incentivized

Snaplogic is unique from other IPASS tools if you're very sensitive about data security as they have an on-premise option where your data never needs to leave your data center. And data pipelines can be quickly created if Snaplogic has the requisite connector to your data sources. On the downside, if you're transforming a large amount of data for example in training machine learning models, a tool with elastic compute capability is more appropriate.

• Informatica Cloud is a great tool for automating data imports. Raw data files can be scheduled to run at designated times, and using pre-built mappings ensures that the data goes into the system accurately each time.
• It is also a great tool for converting raw data into specific formatting. For example, configuring the mapping so that the first letter of a first, middle or last name is always capitalized.
• Additionally, Informatica Cloud has a built-in field-matching tool so that records that already exist are updated rather than having duplicates created.

Incentivized

• Their customer service response time is brilliant.
• SFTP tasks do a great job in reading the file directly from the server, instead of having to download it and then read it.
• Tasks expose the ability to run them using external job schedulers.
• Once you have a server up, setting up SnapLogic service does not take long. They have good documentation and customer support too.

Incentivized

• The User Interface can be a bit difficult to get in initial stages.
• Error messages are hard to understand which sometimes takes a lot of time for the resolution
• Cannot Implement complex SQL queries which should be fixed in future release.

Incentivized

• Git integration outside of Github (Bitbucket, and other git service providers)
• I would like to see an improved way to perform unit testing within the SnapLogic framework, as opposed to the manual approach
• I would prefer that the underlying source of SnapLogic pipelines be more human-readable, although it is a GUI approach to authoring pipelines

Incentivized

This has been hands down the BEST software company I have ever used and dealt with. I am a 25 year IT veteran at this college. They go above and beyond in soliciting our feedback/input and proactively follow up about bugs, issues, etc. I have given multiple potential clients my thoughts and after seeing the SL demo they all sign up. I appreciate their support model, it's REFRESHING!

Incentivized

It is very powerful but has a steep learning curve

Incentivized

I've never had trouble getting into contact with Informatica's support for technical help. I give it a nine because it does pretty well for mid to enterprise-scale workflows.

Incentivized

They can be prompt but they have not been as useful as I've wanted. We had a bug that affected many of our customers through an API connection between SnapLogic and our platform. Eventually they were able to figure it out, but it took a long time of negotiating between our engineering team and theirs. Additionally, we installed the SnapLogic groundplex for our customers and we've run into a bunch of problems of connectivity. If SnapLogic offered to be on those calls with our clients to troubleshoot how to fix these problems, I would give them a better grade here.

Incentivized

The groundplex in our VPC is very nice for security reasons and the SnapLogic team was extremely helpful during our implementation

Incentivized

Having used SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in the past, Informatica Cloud was a huge-step up in functionality, usability and performance. Hands-down, Informatica Cloud is a much more robust product overall. While SSIS is well-suited for specific instances (i.e. SQL Server-specific implementations), Informatica Cloud is a much better product as an overall integration/transformation tool.

Incentivized

Boomi was our runner-up product. The pricing model was much higher and cost-prohibitive. They were not as flexible with pricing on a non-profit higher education institution. We did love their integration code library shared across all clients. The user interface was on par with Snaplogic as well as the features that come included. Overall, seemed like a solid product just found something better for a lower price point.

Incentivized

• A positive impact is bringing more projects.
• Getting data out of various systems such as Salesforce.com or FTP and consolidating it into tables in one central database.
• Having the ability to run data transformation tasks (the equivalent of batch jobs in SF or stored procedures in SQL) on a schedule without consuming those resources on the target or source systems.

Incentivized

• We had a positive impact at our organization where handful of developers were able to integrate more than 50 systems in less than a year. It has helped us a lot by providing access to data that was previously not possible or unimaginable or get in such easy format.
• The only place where it didn't have a positive impact was for a realtime application integration project requiring on the fly aggregations, wherein this tool claimed it could do it but wasn't able to.

Incentivized