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Informatica PowerCenter vs Toad Data Point comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Informatica PowerCenter
Ranking in Data Integration
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
81
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (11th)
Toad Data Point
Ranking in Data Integration
29th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Data Preparation Tools (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Informatica PowerCenter is 9.4%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Toad Data Point is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Lars Borchers - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable and reliable product that provides a variety of features for data integration
The solution is not for newcomers. It has an old touch. The solution must improve the integration with new services. It was part of the program at Informatica when they moved to their cloud platform. It is integrated. However, from an on-premise perspective, we need to buy licenses for PowerExchange. If we want a native driver to access a special service, we need to extend our license to those services. It is expensive. I don't like that it's not all included in the solution.
Aaron Payne - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers power developers the tooling they need
I am not the end user of this solution. I am not close enough to it because I manage the platform that it runs against. The end users who use the Toad tool come against the database that my team manages, so it is hard for me to provide any area for improvement when it comes to the Toad tool. However, in the administration case, cost is a significant issue. The Mac license is incredibly expensive. It is 1,600 dollars each, which is more than the Windows version. Scalability is difficult when it is that costly.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The greatest feature is that it is very easy to have someone come in and jump right in. It is one of the nicest tools in terms of getting a person acquainted quickly."
"In the end, you have structured, proper data for use in an integrated BI solution."
"To me, what's most valuable in Informatica PowerCenter is the flexibility in building the integration pipeline. Usually, you need to have a platform to be able to integrate with different technologies, including legacy data such as the mainframe. The platform should also be rich enough to transform the data per your business requirement, with no restrictions. Rich integration and rich transformation capabilities are the two key capabilities in Informatica PowerCenter. The solution also offers ease of use. Another valuable feature of Informatica PowerCenter is the drag-and-drop integration because it's GUI-based, similar to IBM and Oracle."
"Among all the solutions I have used, I found Informatica PowerCenter to be much more stable in terms of application."
"It's a complete package, which is why we use this solution."
"Error handling capability is quite good in Informatica PowerCenter because it provides a very detailed session log, which is really helpful to identify errors."
"Technical support is great. It's one of the reasons we really like them. When you compare support from IBM and support from Informatica, Informatica is much better."
"UI-based ability to create data mapping."
"We love it."
"With Toad Data Point, I can automate most steps automatically."
"One of the greatest features is that you can get data from anywhere to anywhere with Toad Data Point."
"The best thing about it is its automation features."
"The most valuable features of Toad Data are you could write a parameterized query and it wouldn't error out, it would give you the parameters that you could input. The auto-formatting feature is useful because it was great for keeping your queries neat and understandable. The auto comment, and uncomment toggles that you could do were convenient."
"The Connectivity and Connection Manager supports a broad number of connection types, and it is trivial for end-users to set up their own connections to sources."
"I have never experienced any issues with customer service."
"It provides better SQL development tooling than SQL Developer, which is not a sufficient tool for all development use cases. It offers power developers the tools they need."
 

Cons

"The solution's commercial cost is very high. Other open-source tools can do the tool's functions for free. The world is moving to the cloud, but the solution hasn't updated its drivers. I presume that its downfall will start soon. The tool is trying to cross-sell or upsell without helping customers derive benefits from the existing products. They have multiple tools and licenses. It is better to bring the smaller tools in one umbrella."
"Compared to solutions offering similar functionalities, Informatica PowerCenter is not very flexible regarding customized integrations."
"The licensing cost for Informatica is very high. Other all-in-one solutions have much lower prices than Informatica."
"Some of the conversions are done inside the product. We use work tables that are created by the engine itself, but the names of the work tables are very long, and they don't have any meaning, which makes it a bit difficult to understand and follow exactly what is happening inside."
"There can be scalability issues. Huge amounts of data ingestion will impact performance."
"We had to take on a large volume of data from the legacy Sybase system. This was taking a very long time, i.e., more than a day. We were trying to improve it with partitions to gpload, but we were told that we can't go more than four partitions."
"What needs improvement in Informatica PowerCenter is the cloud experience because, nowadays, other companies, such as AWS, Azure, and Google, have more experience in the cloud. The pricing for Informatica PowerCenter on the cloud is also very expensive for customers, so some customers prefer open-source tools or lower-priced tools, such as Azure. From my point of view, Informatica must work on the pricing policy and review the policy on the cloud for Informatica PowerCenter or propose more tools with lower pricing. Clients want the automatic integration of Informatica PowerCenter with other tools. Currently, the integration process is manual, and you have to add other tools to facilitate the integration, especially with the DevOps methodology. You need scripts and tools for the integration, and you'll need to use other integration tools if you want automatic deployment for Informatica PowerCenter, so this is another area for improvement in the solution. What I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is for the integration with APIs to be simpler, because currently, the API integration feature of Informatica PowerCenter is very difficult. It's not intuitive. You have to facilitate API integration and the real-time streaming of messages in Kafka, for example, so that should be improved."
"Its scalability can be improved. It is not scalable."
"I used their report writing a little bit, however, it could improve since it's not a really good report writer and it's a little clunky."
"The Mac license is incredibly expensive. It is 1,600 dollars each, which is more than the Windows version."
"Toad Data could improve by having additional features, such as query prediction. This could help someone who's not the strongest programmer. If the software could help them write queries correctly it would be very helpful, especially for small development teams or teams that lack the input skills necessary to write and program efficiently."
"It's not user-friendly. Once you start using it, you eventually get to know the features."
"The Mac license is incredibly expensive. It is 1,600 dollars each, which is more than the Windows version. Scalability is difficult when it is that costly."
"On the scheduling server, some scheduled reports just sit there and never execute for the first time. After manually executing the first time, they run with no issues."
"It's not user-friendly. Once you start using it, you eventually get to know the features."
"I used their report writing a little bit, however, it could improve since it's not a really good report writer and it's a little clunky."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The license model is CPU based."
"The price is mostly reasonable."
"I rate the solution's pricing a four out of ten. The price is very high, and it doesn't understand the market now."
"The solution is in the middle price range compared to other solutions."
"The pricing for Informatica PowerCenter is expensive. Some clients have simple needs and only want to integrate and store data. Some clients have small needs, while some clients have bigger needs and focus more on performance and time. The licensing cost for Informatica PowerCenter isn't good. In my project, if I remember correctly, the company pays €20,000 per year for the Informatica PowerCenter license. I'm not aware of additional costs that you need to pay for some features of the solution. On a scale of one to five, I'm rating its price a three."
"We are satisfied with the pricing."
"Licensing is a one time cost. But maintenance costs depend on what you want, how long you need it. Maintenance is a kind of insurance. With health insurance, you don't know whether you will get sick or need to go to hospital or not but you have to have insurance. It's the same thing with support. If you have that expertise in resolving issues, if you have enough experience in your IT department, I would say you don't need the support. But in practice, they recommend you go with the support. If you want support you have to pay for it."
"The pricing is a little expensive, but in the same range as IBM and other competitors."
"The Mac licenses are expensive, costing 1,600 dollars each. This is much higher than for the Windows version. I maintain a very limited number of licenses due to this cost."
"The price of Toad Data Point was approximately $500 annually."
"The cost of this product is reasonable."
report
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Comparison Review

it_user90069 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 20, 2014
Informatica PowerCenter vs. Microsoft SSIS - each technology has its advantages but also have similarities
Technology has made it easier for businesses to organize and manipulate data to get a clearer picture of what’s going on with their business. Notably, ETL tools have made managing huge amounts of data significantly easier and faster, boosting many organizations’ business intelligence operations…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Healthcare Company
12%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How does Azure Data Factory compare with Informatica PowerCenter?
Azure Data Factory is flexible, modular, and works well. In terms of cost, it is not too pricey. It offers the stability and reliability I am looking for, good scalability, and is easy to set up an...
Which is better - SSIS or Informatica PowerCenter?
SSIS PowerPack is a group of drag and drop connectors for Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services, commonly called SSIS. The collection helps organizations boost productivity with code-free compo...
Which Informatica product would you choose - PowerCenter or Cloud Data Integration?
Complex transformations can easily be achieved using PowerCenter, which has all the features and tools to establish a real data governance strategy. Additionally, PowerCenter is able to manage huge...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Toad Data Point?
The pricing for Toad Data Point is where it gets into trouble. Microsoft is free, so if you get SQL Server, you get all the other stuff with it. You have to use several Microsoft tools that don't a...
What needs improvement with Toad Data Point?
I used their report writing a little bit, however, it could improve since it's not a really good report writer and it's a little clunky.
What is your primary use case for Toad Data Point?
When I use it, I'm using it for writing SQL or testing SQL code. I used to use it for moving data, loading files into database tables, from tables to other tables.
 

Also Known As

PowerCenter
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, LexisNexis, Rabobank
Concordia University
Find out what your peers are saying about Informatica PowerCenter vs. Toad Data Point and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.