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 Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle)

Pentaho, a subsidiary of Hitachi Vantara, is an open source platform for data integration and analytics. The software comes in a free community edition and a subscription-based enterprise edition. It runs on-premises rather than as a SaaS application.

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 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	Business intelligence, data integration, ETL	Data integration, ETL	Data ingestion, ELT
Database replication	Full table; incremental via binary logs or SELECT/replication keys	Full table; incremental via change data capture	Full table; incremental via change data capture or SELECT/replication keys
SaaS sources	Only Salesforce and Google Analytics	More than 80	More than 100
Ability for customers to add new data sources	No	Yes	Yes
Connects to data warehouses? Data lakes?	Yes / Yes	Yes / Yes	Yes / Yes
Transparent pricing	No	No	Yes
G2 customer satisfaction	4.2/5	4/5	4.8/5
Support SLAs	Yes	Available	Available
Purchase process	Requires a conversation with sales	Requires conversation with sales	Options for self-service or talking with sales. Also available from the AWS store.
Compliance, governance, and security certifications	None	HIPAA, SOC 2, SOC 3, Privacy Shield	HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2
Data sharing	Yes	Yes, through Informatica Cloud	Yes, through Talend Data Fabric
Vendor lock-in	Annual contracts. Open source version available	Annual contracts. No open source	Month to month or annual contracts. Open source integrations
Developer tools	REST API	Informatica Developer Tool, REST API, Connector Toolkit	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

Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle)

Pentaho supports a wide variety of pre- and post-load transformations through dragging and dropping more than two dozen kinds of operations onto its work area. In addition, users can drag and drop custom scripts in Python, Java, JavaScript, and SQL onto the canvas.

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.

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.

Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle)

Pentaho can take many file types as input, but it can connect to only two SaaS platforms: Google Analytics and Salesforce. It connects to more than 40 databases, as sources or destinations, via JDBC, ODBC, or plugins.

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.

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.

Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle)

Pentaho provides support through a support portal and a community website. Premium support SLAs are available. There's no live support within the application. Documentation is comprehensive. Pentaho provides free and paid training resources, including videos and instructor-led training. A certification program is also available.

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.

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

Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle)

Pentaho provides a 30-day trial download. Contract pricing isn't disclosed.

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.

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.

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Which tool is better overall? That's something every organization has to decide based on its unique requirements, but we can help you get started. Sign up now for a free trial of Stitch.

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