Informatica vs. mParticle vs. Stitch
ETL software comparison
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Most businesses have data stored in a variety of locations, from in-house databases to SaaS platforms. To get a full picture of their finances and operations, they pull data from all those sources into a data warehouse or data lake and run analytics against it. But they don't want to build and maintain their own data pipelines.
Fortunately, it’s not necessary to code everything in-house. Here's an comparison of two such tools, head to head.
About Informatica
Informatica offers a portfolio of data integration products as well as tools for master data management, data quality, data cataloging, and API management. Informatica started out with on-premises tools but now offers a cloud platform as well.
About mParticle
mParticle is a mobile-focused event tracking and data ingestion tool. It lets users track events across multiple applications and send event data to multiple destinations. It's designed to collect and connect customer data from multiple marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools. It's not primarily an ETL tool, but it does include connectivity to some SaaS data sources and data warehouse destinations. To the extent that it performs ETL operations, mParticle focuses on the E and L, extraction and loading.
About Stitch
Stitch Data Loader is a cloud-based platform for ETL — extract, transform, and load. More than 3,000 companies use Stitch to move billions of records every day from SaaS applications and databases into data warehouses and data lakes, where it can be analyzed with BI tools. Stitch is a Talend company and is part of the Talend Data Fabric.
 |  |  | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Focus | Data integration, ETL | Mobile-focused event tracking and data ingestion | Data ingestion, ELT | |||||||||||
| Database replication | Full table; incremental via change data capture | No database sources | Full table; incremental via change data capture or SELECT/replication keys | |||||||||||
| SaaS sources | More than 80 | About 150 | More than 100 | |||||||||||
| Ability for customers to add new data sources | Yes | Yes, via Events API | Yes | |||||||||||
| Connects to data warehouses? Data lakes? | Yes / Yes | Yes / Yes | Yes / Yes | |||||||||||
| Transparent pricing | No | No | Yes | |||||||||||
G2 customer satisfaction | 4/5 | 3.5/5 | 4.8/5 | |||||||||||
| Support SLAs | Available | No | Available | |||||||||||
| Purchase process | Requires conversation with sales | Requires a conversation with sales | Options for self-service or talking with sales. Also available from the AWS store. | |||||||||||
| Compliance, governance, and security certifications | HIPAA, SOC 2, SOC 3, Privacy Shield | GDPR, ISO/IEC 27001:2013, SOC 2 Type II | HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2 | |||||||||||
| Data sharing | Yes, through Informatica Cloud | No | Yes, through Talend Data Fabric | |||||||||||
| Vendor lock-in | Annual contracts. No open source | Annual contracts | Month to month or annual contracts. Open source integrations | |||||||||||
| Developer tools | Informatica Developer Tool, REST API, Connector Toolkit | Several APIs and client SDKs | Import API, Stitch Connect API for integrating Stitch with other platforms, Singer open source project | |||||||||||
Let's dive into some of the details of each platform.
Transformations
Informatica
Informatica has been an on-premises product for most of its history, and much of the product is focused on preload transformations, which is an important feature when sending data to an on-premises data warehouse. Informatica includes a library of prebuilt transformations and the ability to build custom transformations using a proprietary transformation language.
mParticle
mParticle extracts raw data from sources and loads it into destinations without allowing users to define their own transformations — though mParticle itself transforms events and objects to conform to its standard as it sends them between different tools, including to the data warehouse. mParticle also lets users create preload transformations in a graphical interface, and write custom rules in JavaScript.
Stitch
Stitch is an ELT product. Within the pipeline, Stitch does only transformations that are required for compatibility with the destination, such as translating data types or denesting data when relevant. Stitch is part of Talend, which also provides tools for transforming data either within the data warehouse or via external processing engines such as Spark and MapReduce. Transformations can be defined in SQL, Python, Java, or via graphical user interface.
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Connectors: Data sources and destinations
Each of these tools supports a variety of data sources and destinations.
Informatica
Informatica provides Cloud Connectors for more than 100 applications and databases. The only cloud data warehouse destination it supports is Amazon Redshift. It also support Pivotal's Greenplum on-premises platform. The only data lake destination it supports is Microsoft Azure SQL Data Lake. Developers can create new connectors using Informatica Connector Toolkit.
mParticle
mParticle has a different focus than most ETL tools — it's designed to track events from applications, websites, and mobile apps and unify them into customer profiles. An event is a set of actions that represents a step in the funnel, such as user invited or signed up or order completed. Users can define events that make sense for their business use cases, based on key metrics that provide business value. You embed mParticle tracking into mobile apps or connected devices. The platform creates unique mobile identifiers and tracks things like device IDs, location data, and in-app activity. mParticle supports about 170 destinations, most of which are SaaS platforms for marketing, advertising, and analytics. It also supports data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake. Customers can use mParticle's developer tools to track new event sources, but no one outside of the mParticle team or its partners can build new cloud app sources.
Stitch
Stitch supports more than 100 database and SaaS integrationsas data sources, and eight data warehouse and data lake destinations. Customers can contract with Stitch to build new sources, and anyone can add a new source to Stitch by developing it according to the standards laid out in Singer, an open source toolkit for writing scripts that move data. Singer integrations can be run independently, regardless of whether the user is a Stitch customer. Running Singer integrations on Stitch’s platform allows users to take advantage of Stitch's monitoring, scheduling, credential management, and autoscaling features.
Support, documentation, and training
Data integration tools can be complex, so vendors offer several ways to help their customers. Online documentation is the first resource users often turn to, and support teams can answer questions that aren't covered in the docs. Vendors of the more complicated tools may also offer training services.
Informatica
Informatica provides three levels of support. Basic Success is available during business hours. Premium Success offers 24x7 support for Priority 1 cases. Signature Support offers 24x7 support for all cases. Documentation is comprehensive. The company offers training through Informatica University.
mParticle
mParticle provides support via email. Documentation is comprehensive. Digital training materials are not available.
Stitch
Stitch provides in-app chat support to all customers, and phone support is available for Enterprise customers. Support SLAs are available. Documentation is comprehensive and is open source — anyone can contribute additions and improvements or repurpose the content. Stitch does not provide training services.
Pricing
Informatica
Informatica has many products, each of which may have several optional components. The base version of Integration Cloud starts at $2,000 per month. The pricing of add-on tiers is undisclosed. Informatica provides a 30-day free trial for many of its products.
mParticle
Pricing is not disclosed.
Stitch
Stitch has pricing that scales to fit a wide range of budgets and company sizes. All new users get an unlimited 14-day trial. Standard plans range from $100 to $1,250 per month depending on scale, with discounts for paying annually. Enterprise plans for larger organizations and mission-critical use cases can include custom features, data volumes, and service levels, and are priced individually.
Get started now
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