Open Source ETL tools vs Commercial ETL tools

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Recently I have been asked by my company to make a case for open-source ETL-data integration tools as an alternative for the commercial data integration tool, Informatica PowerCenter.
So I did a lot of research and I'm going to try my best, considering I have never used the open-source tools nor the commercial one.

I found plenty of information about comparisons between Pentaho Kettle and Talend, which were 2 of the open-source tools I was supposed to research.
Now, without getting in a big arguement (or matt casters posting on my blog), I'd like to attempt to compare the two, very briefly.
And again, this is ONLY from the research I did online and not based on my experience using the tools (since I dont really have any).

Pentaho Kettle vs Talend

Pentaho
Pentaho is a commerical open-source BI suite that has a product called Kettle for data integration.
It uses an innovative meta-driven approach and has a strong and very easy-to-use GUI.
The company started around 2001 (2002 was when kettle was integrated into it).
It has a strong community of 13,500 registered users.
It has a stand-alone java engine that process the jobs and tasks for moving data between many different databases and files.
It can schedule tasks (but you need a schedular for that - cron).
It can run remote jobs on "slave servers" on other machines.
It has data quality features: from its own GUI, writing more customised SQL queries, Javascript and regular expressions.


Talend
Talend is an open-source data integration tool (not a full BI suite).
It uses a code-generating approach. Uses a GUI, but within Eclipse RC.
It started around October 2006
It has a much smaller community then Pentaho but has 2 finance companies supporting it.
It generates java or perl code which you later run on your server.
It can schedule tasks (also with using schedulars like cron).
It has data quality features: from its own GUI, writing more customised SQL queries and Java.


Comparison - (from my understanding)
Pentaho is faster (twice as fast maybe) then Talend.
Pentaho's GUI is easier to use then Talend's GUI and takes less time to learn.


My impression
Pentaho is easier to use because of its GUI.
Talend is more a tool for people who are making already a Java program and want to save lots and lots of time with a tool that generates code for them.



Assuming Pentaho made it to the next round....

Pentaho Kettle vs Informatica

Informatica
Informatica is a very good commercial data integration suite.
It was founded in 1993
It is the market share leader in data integration (Gartner Dataquest)
It has 2600 customers. Of those, there are fortune 100 companies, companies on the Dow Jones and government organization.
The company's sole focus is data integration.
It has quite a big package for enterprises to integrate their systems, cleanse their data and can connect to a vast number of current and legacy systems.
Its very expensive, will require training some of your staff to use it and probably require hiring consultants as well. (I hear Informatica consultants are well paid).
Its very fast and can scale for large systems. It has "Pushdown Optimization" which uses an ELT approach that uses the source database to do the transforming - like Oracle Warehouse Builder.


Comparison
Pentaho's Javascipt is very powerful when writing transformation tasks.
Informatica has many more enterprise features, for example, load balancing between database servers.
Pentaho's GUI requires less training then Informatica.
Penatho doesn't require huge upfront costs as Informatica does. (that part you saw coming, I'm sure)
(edited)Informatica is faster then Pentaho. Infromatica has Pushdown Optimization, but with some tweaking to Pentaho and some knowledge of the source database, you can improve the speed of Pentaho. (also see line below)
(new)You can place Pentaho Kettle on many different servers (as many as you like, its free) and use it as a cluster.
Informatica has much better monitoring tools then Pentaho.


My Impression
Informatica is a really good enterprise ETL suite, but is very big and expensive.
If the system is small enough, I would rather give Pentaho a try and there are many many use cases where big companies used Pentaho (an airport, a hospital..).

Open Source ETL vs Commercial ETL

Conclusion

I think matt casters said it best when he said:

The flood of open source software is going to wash away the proprietary ones..

If you want to add (or correct) to the information I wrote here, then please consider doing so, as I am still trying to understand these products myself.
Your opinion is valued.



Thank you for reading my blog.