--- title: IBM DataStage Reviews meta_title: 'IBM DataStage Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 73 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how IBM DataStage works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.0 review_count: 73 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-13' parent_category: name: Cloud Data Integration url: https://www.g2.com/categories/cloud-data-integration --- # IBM DataStage Reviews **Vendor:** IBM **Category:** [Big Data Integration Platforms](https://www.g2.com/categories/big-data-integration-platforms) **Average Rating:** 4.0/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 73 ## About IBM DataStage IBM® InfoSphere® DataStage® is a leading ETL platform that integrates data across multiple enterprise systems. It leverages a high performance parallel framework, available on-premises or in the cloud. The scalable platform provides extended metadata management and enterprise connectivity. It integrates heterogeneous data, including big data at rest (Hadoop-based) or big data in motion (stream-based), on both distributed and mainframe platforms. It supports IBM Db2® Z and Db2 for z/OS®, applies workload and business rules, and integrates real-time data in an easy to deploy, scalable platform. Learn More: https://ibm.co/2NpHEtZ ## IBM DataStage Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **customization options** in DataStage, enabling tailored solutions for diverse data processing needs. (1 reviews) - Users value the **high-performance data pipelining** of IBM DataStage, enabling efficient processing of massive datasets seamlessly. (1 reviews) - Users value the **high-performance parallel processing** of IBM DataStage, enabling efficient handling of massive data volumes. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of use** of IBM DataStage, thanks to its intuitive drag-and-drop interface for ETL processes. (1 reviews) - Users commend the **high-performance parallel processing** of IBM DataStage, enabling efficient handling of massive data volumes seamlessly. (1 reviews) - ETL Process (1 reviews) - Flexibility (1 reviews) - Intuitive (1 reviews) - Performance (1 reviews) - Reliability (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users face **complex processes** in IBM DataStage, struggling with steep learning curves and clunky legacy systems. (1 reviews) - Users face significant **dependency issues** with IBM DataStage, struggling with vendor lock-in and complex migration processes. (1 reviews) - Users criticize the **high costs and complex licensing** of IBM DataStage, limiting access for smaller businesses. (1 reviews) - Users express frustration over the **lack of real-time data** capabilities in IBM DataStage, hindering timely insights. (1 reviews) - Users face a **steep learning curve** with IBM DataStage due to its complex and unintuitive setup, especially for newcomers. (1 reviews) - Limitations (1 reviews) - Steep Learning Curve (1 reviews) - Technical Expertise (1 reviews) - Technical Expertise Required (1 reviews) ## IBM DataStage Reviews ### 1. Blazingly Fast, Full-Featured ETL tool with Flexible Data Connections **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Steve L. | Integration Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 22, 2026 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** DataStage is a full-featured and blazingly fast ETL tool. It handles many different types of data connection, and gives excellent options for parameterising processes to facilitate code promotion. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** The UI feels dated and for some "Stage" types (most notably "Hierarchical Stages") it can be difficult to understand. There isn't a lot of online assistance from typical forums (fora?) and much of IBMs help is difficult to access as it's hidden behind their login requirements. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** DataStage helps us process huge volumes of data into our Data Warehouse (on a Netezza appliance) on a regular basis. We also use it for many of our system-to-system integrations. It handles many use cases that SSIS had previously struggled with, though this is partly due to being paired with further tooling that wasn't available to us when using SSIS. ### 2. Unmatched Performance and Reliability for Enterprise Data Workloads **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Poojasree M. | Associate Lead, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 20, 2025 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** The most impressive aspect of DataStage is its high-performance parallel processing engine, which allows it to handle massive enterprise data volumes with ease. By utilizing "pipelining" and "partitioning," the system can process different stages of a job simultaneously across multiple CPU nodes. This means that instead of waiting for one task to finish before the next begins, data flows through the pipeline like an assembly line, ensuring that even petabyte-scale workloads are completed within tight processing windows. Furthermore, its visual design environment offers a sophisticated balance between simplicity and power. The drag-and-drop interface allows engineers to build complex ETL logic using pre-built "Stages" for joins, lookups, and transformations without needing to write manual code. However, it remains highly extensible for developers; if a specific requirement isn't met by a standard component, you can integrate custom Python scripts or SQL, making it flexible enough for both standard reporting and complex data science pipelines. Finally, DataStage excels in enterprise-grade reliability and governance, which is why it remains a staple in highly regulated industries like finance and healthcare. It integrates seamlessly with metadata catalogs to provide end-to-end data lineage, allowing users to track exactly how data has changed from source to target. Combined with robust error-handling and "Reject Links" that capture bad data without crashing the entire job, it provides a level of stability and auditability that many lightweight or open-source tools struggle to match. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** One of the most significant drawbacks of IBM DataStage is its prohibitive cost and complex licensing model, which often makes it inaccessible for small-to-medium businesses. Beyond the high initial purchase price, the "IBM Tax" includes ongoing maintenance and specialized infrastructure requirements that scale aggressively with data volume. Furthermore, because the tool is highly proprietary, organizations face heavy vendor lock-in; migrating logic out of DataStage to a modern, open-source-friendly stack like dbt or Airbyte is notoriously difficult and time-consuming. From a technical standpoint, many engineers find the platform increasingly clunky and "legacy" compared to agile, cloud-native alternatives. While its parallel engine is powerful, it requires deep, specialized expertise to tune—settings like partition methods and buffer sizes are manual and unintuitive, leading to a steep learning curve for new hires. Additionally, while the newer "Next Gen" versions have improved, the ecosystem is still criticized for being batch-heavy, making it less agile for teams that require modern real-time streaming or "DataOps" automation. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** IBM DataStage primarily solves the challenge of data fragmentation and processing bottlenecks in massive enterprise environments. Large organizations often have data trapped in "silos" across legacy mainframes, modern cloud databases, and various third-party applications; DataStage provides a unified, high-performance bridge to extract and harmonize this information. Its parallel processing engine solves the "time problem" by breaking down petabyte-scale datasets into smaller chunks and processing them simultaneously, ensuring that critical business reports and data warehouses are updated within strict overnight windows rather than taking days to complete. The primary benefit to you and your organization is data trust and operational efficiency. Because the platform includes built-in data quality and governance tools, it automatically cleanses and validates records as they move through the pipeline, reducing the risk of making business decisions based on "dirty" or inaccurate data. Furthermore, its "design once, run anywhere" architecture allows your team to build a data flow once and deploy it across on-premises servers or multiple cloud providers without rewriting code. This saves significant development time and future-proofs your infrastructure, allowing you to focus on gaining insights rather than troubleshooting manual data transfers. ### 3. Exceptional Performance and Connectivity with Intuitive Interface **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ivan S. | Analista de Processos, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 03, 2025 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Wide Connectivity, High Performance and Scalability, Intuitive Graphical Interface **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** High Learning Curve, Infrastructure Dependency **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Complex data integration, Data transformation and cleaning ### 4. Data Integration and Quality with DataStage **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Max R. | Sócio-proprietário, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 18, 2025 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Best data integration tool on the market with a wide range of connectors and advanced data integration and quality features. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** I quite like the platform as a whole, but I believe it can improve regarding data lineage (it should indeed improve now with the arrival of Manta to the IBM portfolio). **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Help our clients work with integrated, qualified, and reliable data. ### 5. Using Datastage for ETL **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kapil K. | Graduate Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 12, 2023 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** We use InfoSphere DataStage for ETL in our organisation and as datastage can easily handle large data (Tbs) and we can transform our data easily. It's easier to design our jobs in datastage and to run them. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** As a beginner I found using datastage hard. As there are so many functionalities and hence it takes time to get a hang of it. But once you start practicing it, it becomes easy. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** As our organisation handle very large data and to extract, transform and load we need some powerful tool. Hence Datastage is solving our problem by handling it prefectly. And we are easily able to build our ETL jobs. ### 6. IBM Datastage for ETL **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 08, 2024 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** IBM InfoSphere DataStage is simple yet efficient tool for ETL processing. It has the variety of stages to implement your designs and test the same at runtime. It has got additional features compared to other ETL tools, which helps in debugging and error handling. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Datastage is UI is little at the backseat compared to other ETL tools. Stages could be categorised based on functionalities. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is solving the data integration problems from variety of platforms and provide approciate data formats at the end user. Like, JSON, Files, txts, DB , amd Bigdata etc ### 7. Analyzing vendor data **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2024 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** There are two reasons for us to use it, less cost, and because it's user friendly. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Customer support is excellent, furthermore there can be some improvement on the number of features. We did not face any problems during its implementation and its integration. Frequency of use is not high as we are not just relying on it, but we might in future. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** I cannot disclose it because of the company's policy, but in brief we are using it to analyse multiple vendor data. ### 8. Powerful product **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marcos J. | Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2023 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** This tool has many options: a large number of connectors, ease of use of stages (jobs, sequences). It is possible to introduce code and make calls via restApi. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Now it seems that you have to work from CloudPak as a cartridge.. this makes the solution more expensive **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** We work with many data sources, this helps us manage them. On the other hand, we do integrations every few hours which means we are close to working in real time. ### 9. Data Stage review **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2023 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** - excellent performance in executing ETL processes for large amounts of data. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** - Lack of documentation and available knowledge for study and learning. - Lack of support from the supplier (various problems with the product and also lack of support for functionalities like the quality stage). - Interface is not at all intuitive and difficult to use. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** execution of ETL processes and data quality. ### 10. Review on IBM Infosphere Datastage **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Simran T. | Engineering Analyst, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 10, 2023 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** DataStage helps us to construct a source model that describes the rules for querying the source database. We have used several stages while making Dimension tables and fact table like transformer, lookup, joins etc. Steps are so easy to use that we must drag and drop the stages required for building the tables. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** The thing that I don't like about IBM Infosphere Datastage application is a plan of it is costly. Also, the Metadata propagation in Jobs is somewhat complex for some users and issues in the processing of XML. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** IBM Infosphere Datastage is used to develop jobs that move data from source systems to target systems using simple steps. It is not only data warehousing, we can also use infosphere for analysis and see the enormous architecture of your OLTP systems ### 11. Good product **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2024 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Its speed. It is very fast and responsive. Support is good. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** a little hard to use and implement. hs few bugs **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** fast data integration and processing ### 12. IBM InfoSphere DataStage **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2023 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Easy of use, easy of implementation, compact product. Very good team of customer support. Great performance for large data volumes, allows parallelism **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** it is not support code versioning without git integration **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data Transformation, Data governance, interconnection of non-homogeneous origins, quick creation of interfaces between applications. Creation and impletation of data quality rules ### 13. My experience with datastage **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gopal A. | Senior Software Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 27, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** What i like most in DataStage that on SaaS delivers ultimate flexibility , load balancing is almost automated though it’s required some tweak on parallel engine . **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** nothing as per now . For multicloud and integration it has no match though some issue with DB2 . It also supports the least access policy which most of tools lagging . There is no match for user interface . **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** What i like most in DataStage that on SaaS delivers ultimate flexibility , load balancing is almost automated though it’s required some tweak on parallel engine . For multicloud and integration it has no match though some issue with DB2 . It also supports the least access policy which most of tools lagging . There is no match for user interface . ### 14. User Friendly. Less Query. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Prajwal S. | ETL Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 06, 2022 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** New Features using connectors stage directly with connections URL strings. Problem can be solved just by drag and drop. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Still, at some point, I have to write SQL queries manually, and at some point, there is some technical issue arising where IBM experts are not answerable, eg: Tracing **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** Could thoroughly choose the IBM suite for ETL development. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Transformation of data and reading Data from old excel files to create reports. Benefits in data migration. Another benfit is parallelism. ### 15. I had 15+ experienced on IBM Datastage. Today, remotely helping to client anywhere in World !!! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jigna N. M. | Result+Quality Solution Provider on Any Technology, Business, Management etc. Anywhere in The World!, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 24, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Business need fulfilled w.r.t. Sources. Json, XML,XLS,big data, etc feature. Many tools availble but majority designer, operational console used. Really, upgrading things as per demand in market. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** No free or trail version of software available. git not supported but latest version supported.. very costly require to provide free or trail or cost minimize.. **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** It is easy tool to learn compared to other etl tools. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Admin, performance improvement, job recovery, build logic etc. problem solving w.r.t. client request. Which help me to grow my business as I am Datastage Expert ### 16. IBM InfoSphere Datastage **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 12, 2022 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Ease of learning the tool but however it is not as intuitive as other etl tools like informatica, matillion etc **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** The tool takes too much time to load the data **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** The support provided by IBM is not great looking at the amount of money they charge **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** The concurrency of thread is a great feature but it delays the run time for any ETL job ### 17. Best User Interface with all features in peers **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gaurav H. | Senior ETL Developer (Snowflake Cloud), Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 24, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** -simplicity and User Interface -Multicloud, AI-powered data integration -speed of workload execution -DataStage on SaaS delivers ultimate flexibility -love the extensive set of prebuilt connectors and stages -parallel engine and automated load balancing -metadata support for policy-driven data access **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** There is nothing to dislike in DataStage, working on DataStage since long time now. It is simply great. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** IBM's official documentation is so informative that helps to resolve many issues ### 18. Datastage capabilities **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sinchan S. | Consultant - Analytics & Insights, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 14, 2022 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Integration with several data sources, data transformation capabilities and series of data quality checks and master data management abilities **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Dedicated components for pig, hana etc. connectivity with sharepoint etc. **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** A strong data integration package **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data lake population from discrete data sources so that series of analytics and data science implementations can be performed ### 19. IBM INFOSPHERE DATA STAGE REVIEW **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sayan C. | Technology Specialist, Insight & Data, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Flexibility of handling huge data volume. Robust platform to slove complex business problems. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Connectivity with heterogeneous systems. e.g. connecting one source as DB and another source from a file stored in haddop ecosystem. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Transfoemed data from multiple sources and finally retrofit the results into clients proposed data warehouse. ### 20. It has very clean interface and very well optimized to operate. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Syed Talha A. | Data Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 17, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Details, controls, and a variety of graphs. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** There is nothing which I can say I don't like in Infosphere. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** It gives very good infographics to analyze data and the benefit which i realize, it saves money of the organization. ### 21. IBM Data Stage Review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Amlan Anupam P. | Senior Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 20, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** The user experience is really good and features also **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Can work on the integration with other etl tools **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** Yes **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** I worked in one business solutions and it helped me a lot. ### 22. Recommended ETL Tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** graphical notation, parallel job flows and reusable components **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Sometimes the performance is not up to mark,and complex replication process **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Enterprise-scale overnight batch processing jobs. It's scalable and reliable with an option to auto-heal ### 23. IBM Datastage Review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Amrin K. | Backend Engineering Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 12, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** User friendly and has advanced options to perform ETL. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Costly as compared to other ETL tool like Informatica and security could have been better. **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** Increased level of security and cost effectiveness. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Banking usecase to process large amount of transactions of purchases of loans, credit cards and so on, on a daily basis. ### 24. A wonderful experience of managing information efficiently. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2021 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** The best part is I can synchronise my data any number of times. The flexibility it provides with relational and non-relational databases. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** A mild bumper we are trying to figure out the job history reports or errors in the job. No track of metadata created manually. **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** If looking out for ETL, a must go to. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data integration, real-time data integration. It really helped in minimising the maintenance time of the integration process. ### 25. Great overall experience. This ETL tool is very reliable and has many features for data processing **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arnon F. | BI & ETL & IT Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 18, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** IBM InfoSphere DataStage can provide a great performance since it works with the concept of data parallelism processing across the nodes you can define over settings. As any other ETL tool it can help users to understand the goal of each program easily through the visual data flow. It's well designed to be scalable and it also provides many features and packs according to the new trends (Big Data, Machine Learning etc) being very flexible to run custom codes developed in other programming languages. The idea of dividing the tool in the Designer module, Director module and Administrator module is also a plus in my opinion. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Being a real advanced developer of IBM InfoSphere DataStage is not really an easy task since there are many tricks and many concepts of data parallelism processing that need to be applied in the programs to achieve the best results. Sometimes there are some metadata bugs that requires starting and stopping the DataStage services to fix it. The newer versions of the client runs "heavy" and require a good desktop computer (memory/cpu) to run smoothly. It's a reliable tool but it's also expensive, if you need to upgrade the version, certainly you will need IBM's support to do so. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** You can use IBM InfoSphere DataStage as a Data Integration and ETL tool. You can extract data from many different sources (sequential files, databases, web services etc) and process it inside DataStage applying many data munging techniques (join, aggregation, calculations, export, import, load etc). The main benefit of this tool is allowing the company to centralize all data processing jobs on this toll and making it easier to manage. ### 26. Best Data Integration tool for On premise RDBMS requirements **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chanakyan P. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 18, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** The designer has a great UI to develop the code. The palette has a wide variety of stages for all transformations and data quality requirements. The director helps you compile and run the ETL jobs. It also helps us to check the state of the job before running the job. If Information Analyzer (IA) is chosen to do the data profiling, the rules created in IA can be directly imported to Data Stage to accelerate the development process. The tool has a transformer stage which is capable of doing most of the transformations. The tool also helps you develop and maintain your data transfer jobs and control jobs as parallel and sequence jobs respectively thereby avoiding confusions. It has a wide variety of partitioning techniques that can help you optimize the parallel jobs It is flexible enough to connect with different types of relational and non relational databases Reading logs is so easy with the Director. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Sometimes, the error messages that we get will be totally irrelevant to the actual error in the job. There are limited forums to discuss challenges in using the tool. Configuring DSNs on the LINUX server is sometimes very challenging when we don't have a handy guide to help us. Limited information available in the documentation provided. Code comparison is a challenging while promoting jobs to higher environments. An additional feature to do that will be really helpful The jobs can't be debugged using check points. The tool can be improved for cloud integration capabilities **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** I highly recommend IBM Infosphere Data Stage for Data integration requirements related to RDBMS and MDM systems **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Creating MDM MaintainParty XMLs from multiple data sources. The tool has a stage called Hierarchical stage which helps you generate recurring objects in the XMLs in an easy manner. ### 27. I was not very knowledgeable about ETL... **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Claudenes Renato S. | Systems Analyst, .Net Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 18, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** I worked with IBM InfoSphere DataStage for 1 year. It was a very good experience, because I was not very knowledgeable about ETL and through it I was able to understand and work better because it was very easy. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Perhaps what I did not like, was the problems of connections with some databases **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** I worked with IBM InfoSphere DataStage for 1 year. It was a very good experience, because I was not very knowledgeable about ETL and through it I was able to understand and work better because it was very easy. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** It was used to work with ETL. Transfer data from SQL to Oracle. there were also migrations from SQL to SQL with information transformations ### 28. Great ETL Platform that Integrates Data Across Multiple Enterprise Systems **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 18, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Datastage supports multiple data sources which include but not limited to sequential files, indexed files, relational databases, external data sources, archives, enterprise applications. Also, it is also easy to adapt and learn the tools by a developer. It is backed by a strong enterprise support and IBM provides good documentation. It has been widely used and most trusted and recommended Data Integration Tools available in the market. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Since it is an enterprise solution, there is a high competition in terms of latest tools available in the market and the UI is current and easy to use. It is not easy to get use cases and help online to implement few functionalities. It is not easy to convince a Customer who are not tided to IBM tools **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** I would recommend Datastage due to the below points and it is worth giving it a shot before considering any ETL tool available in the market. Based on highly scalable parallel processing approach Direct link to enterprise applications is used as sources or targets Operates in three different modes- batch, real-time and web service **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have used mostly to process data as per the customer needs and as the tool is versatile and supports different data sources which helped achieve the goal easily. I have realized that it is one of the tool which helped to solve complex data integration workload across multiple sources and cleanse the data which can be used readily for processing. ### 29. One of the best ETL tool for the need **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** RAVIKUMAR V. | Sr. Data Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 21, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** The way of design. It is somewhat easy to understand and easy to use. Especially the parallel processing. Also it has the capability of using sequences and server jobs too. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** It would be nice if we could able to view first 10 records in the dataset. Also the day types rounding. For example even though the oracle data type is date, it shows as time stamp. Also, if we are keying in a decimal (40,38) to the dataset, we would not be able to view the correct data thru dataset. **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** Identify the need before going into any tool. Sometimes we may think that we could able to achieve using other tools. Be specific to what you need. I recommend Datastage tool for any ETL or ELT purpose. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** All ETL and ELT solutions. It’s an easy and we can monitor the logs for historical runs as well. ### 30. Datastage - ETL tool of choice **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 07, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** 1) Datastage on Cloud pak for data helps you to build modern Information Architecture - Starting point for your journey to AI 2) Authorizes high-performance batch also real-time data extraction, transforming and loading. 3) Provides built-in scalability to future-proof your architecture. 4) Assists developers to be extra efficient and productive throughout automation and also reuse of common development responsibilities with touch of AI 5)The specific powerful, industry-leading ETL engine gives built-in scalability to future-proof your design using a design-once-and deploy-anywhere way. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Debugging for previous datastage versions 11.5 and earlier was real pain - You will see lot of unwanted meaningless messages in datastage director. The error messages can be really hard to understand and interpret **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Primarily used for Data Ingestion and transformation ### 31. Sr. IBM DataStage ETL Developer **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Venkata S G. | Sr. DataStage ETL Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 18, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Parallisam and partision are the best features for this tool **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** IBM Support taking more time to get answers. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Database connections ### 32. IBM DataStage **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 18, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Datastage is really good software for data processing. All the data process, we can do using graphical user interface. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Mostly, i liked everything about it. But I feel like they need to add way, user can use existing sequences in different jobs. So it will be easy to use **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was part of team, where we are processing a big chunk of data from the mainframe. It's really faster to processing data. ### 33. Datastage is the best for Parallel processing **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 18, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** One of the best tool in the market for Parallel processing and partition techniques. Run your Batch jobs with Grid environment with multi node configuration **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** UI is not user friendly, editing columns and mapping between stages are tedious process. **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** If you want process large datasets then this is right tool for you **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mainly used for data integration and data cleanup and best for ETL solutions ### 34. Best ETL tool i have worked **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yougasundar P. | Senior Data Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 09, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** well packed tool - IBM Information Server suite, Contain all data management streamline under umbrella. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** many versions rolled out in short time.. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** ETL - Data Integration & Migration, ESB-Soap Services & Rest API's, Data Quality-, Data Profiling ### 35. Good **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Utilities | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 16, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Separate developer,Admin and logging tools **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Backend logs not comes in handy when need to anaylse old runs deeply **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** ETL functionality between systems is easy ### 36. Robust ETL tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 18, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Pallelism, Runtime column propagation, Ease of development, integration with various other infosphere tools. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** source code versioning is not available ( cannot rollback to previous versions) **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Complex Data processing to enable accurate reporting to Banking and Retails gaints ### 37. The best bang-for-buck Enterprise Data Integration Platform **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Government Administration | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 11, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Unparalleled connectivity, flow-based UI, modern capabilities like Spark **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Latest Git integration is poor, needs better data profiling integration **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** Look at third party DevOps solutions for DataStage **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data integration, data quality, and cloud migration ### 38. Difficult to analyze,maintain and debug jobs **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 01, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** The software is able to handle the workload pretty well. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** I find it difficult to do impact analysis on existing jobs. Being used to seeing code, I don't like the interface where you have to navigate a graphical representation of the job to review the underlying code. Also, I encounter a lot of connection issues with the server and end up having to kill the app on the client. There was also one-time where the project folder we where using got corrupted and had to redo our work over again. Diagnosing problems with the jobs is also difficult. If you're used to using code debugging tools, you won't find anything similar to debug your processing. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use DataStage to do ETL processing and connect systems from different environments. ### 39. best ETL Platform for data transformation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 24, 2020 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Best data transformation tool for handling huge volume of data with parallelisam concept implementation by the IBM **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** On permises tool and expensive tool among other ETL tools in the market **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data transformation, data integration and data migration in the organzation between various systems ### 40. IBM InfoSphere DataStage is a very good product **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Wu P. | Sr. Datastage Architect/ Leader, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 26, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** IBM InfoSphere DataStage is a very good product, I used it for 14 years, it is very easy for mapping columns, it can use different source system, very easy to find the program bug **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** None, I like this product, I am very happy use it, the performance also is good. **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** I recommend other company use it **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** it solved our lots of issue, it can handle SAP source system, flat file ### 41. Review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** MohanRaj K. | Employee, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 15, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Having good Connectivity. It can Handling large numbers of records. Regarding data Varied partitioning algorithms available. It has Complementary packages of connectivity to applications, SAP, etc. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** You must have understand and know the algorithms, since the wrong use of them, it generates more time in processing. Metadata. You need to develop with connectors, and taking all the Metadata from the menu, all the data that you complete manually, you can't track it. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** DS is one of the most powerful ETL tools on the market. Its connects to different bases plus the pack make it a solid tool, and complete. It can support different sources like SKP, Oracle, SQL. It has a great number of functions, and the work with a big amount of data with DS is not complex (as long as you have the knowledge and know how to handle the partitioning algorithms, etc). ### 42. I sold Datastage & Quality stage to an helthcare & Insurance company to improve their data quality **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Fernando V. | Gerente Comercial, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 12, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Engine is great, you can make complex projects and the engine steel work as you need. The on line quality functionality is easy to configure and is excelent to improve the data charge and the self data administration. But the best of the productis that is very easy to define the ROI of the projects that need it. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Its inicial setup is complex and need very specialized technicians to make it work correctly. It need a lot of work about security policies that needs to be modify. It has some issues that makes bottlenecks so fine tunning is needed. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** complex proceses of ETL for DataLakes or Datawarehouses. Batch proceses for Data quality, especialy merging customer information between aquisition companys and the main company. online data quality en web sites and mobile apps. ### 43. Ease of Use **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Cheng G. | Data Specialist, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 12, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** It is very easy to use and learn.It has alot of modules that can help in your ETL jobs. My favorite module in the program is the transform tool. It makes my job alot easier, **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** It does not handle really large volumes of data really well. The error log is sometimes hard to decipher. It is not as easy to know what went wrong, although it is really eay to use the program **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** Easy to use **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** We mainly use it to normalize large volume of data for our clients. The standardized data is then sent to our analysts to review. It makes their job smoother ### 44. Integration at its Beast **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Prasanth K. | Business Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 07, 2018 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** We use Infosphere Datastage to extract and load data into our Data Warehouse meant for Financials and Supply chain. We have about 400+ jobs that runs on a daily basis to load the data from various different sources. We have been using this product for many years and eventually support went to IBM. Oracle used to provide the support as we had implemented as part of Oracle PeopleSoft EPM and now it's moved over to IBM. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** The only issue we had was we never got HA working with this product. Although we had shared storage but when there is a failure we had to manually fail over to the other node. We configured HA for this installation on an IBM AIX infrastructure and it never worked the way we wanted. It was not seamless but had to manually intervene for it to resume jobs for the other node. The cost of the tool and desire of the development staff to move to more Hive and MapReduce have limited the products use in the last year. **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** Stable, we are able to complete jobs within the SLA that we have committed to the business **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have about 400+ jobs that runs on a daily basis to load the data from various different sources.Overall our experience has been very good except for couple of need for improvement. Ease of Integration. Capacity analysis of your database would be significant feature. Please make sure ### 45. Infosphere Datastage **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sal U. | Programmer analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 12, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Product easly transforms data into our data warehouse.. Have been using for several years about to upgrade to version 11.7. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** patches could be easierto install (we are currently using 11.3 planning an upgrade) **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** getting data into our warehouse, tranforming and gathering data from other product databases. ### 46. Datastage Review at Flagstar Bank **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 14, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Scalability of Datastage is amazing . It also runs fairly well in all platforms . **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Auditing capabalities could have been better . **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** I would request anyone using the other ETL tools to migrate to Datastage for its ability to scale . **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Datastage is used for Data Integration and TRanslations. We use Datastage to read the flatfiles from source systems and then create a Data Lake, Landing, Atomic Warehouse and respective business unit data marts ### 47. ETL with rocket boosters **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Teja T. | Team Lead, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 11, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Easy to use tool to massage and transform data to best suite business needs. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** no think clint, no check in/check out directly baked into the product. **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** Baked in TEST Suite to achive complete DevOps **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Pretty much every thing that can be performed with data. ### 48. DataStage is the most mature product in the industry for all of my ETL needs **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kevin M. | Enterprise Architech Vice President, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 14, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** I like the fact that this product is fully matured and keeping up with industry trends. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** My one complaint is that the product is not easily upgradeable. **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** Best in the industry! **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data movement and integration. ### 49. Excellent ETL Tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 11, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** Drag and drop build GUI. Items are easy to find and easy to align to build process flows. DataQuality is built in a maintainable at the load level. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Some data conversion tasks are not as straight forward and they appear to be. **Recommendations to others considering IBM DataStage:** Good universal ETL platform for multiple types of data sources and data destinations. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** DataStage is being used to perform ETL for multiple projects, Used for data warehouse input as well as processes that are extracting data warehouse data. ### 50. An Amazing ETL Experience **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jamion W. | Team Lead, Data Management, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 12, 2019 **What do you like best about IBM DataStage?** The barrier of entry to using Datastage is incredibly low, making it easy to use. **What do you dislike about IBM DataStage?** Legacy architecture makes certain features buggy. It is hard to separate OS faults from those of the tool. **What problems is IBM DataStage solving and how is that benefiting you?** Intensely fast ETL for data integration batch cycles. ## IBM DataStage Discussions - [Can I possible to have free version of ibm Datastage in cloud based?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/can-i-possible-to-have-free-version-of-ibm-datastage-in-cloud-based) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [How do I use the BDFS stage in Datastage?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/30721-how-do-i-use-the-bdfs-stage-in-datastage) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [View IBM DataStage pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/ibm-datastage/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-13+14%3A16%3A08+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=d818ffe6-e234-4025-a8d7-3c96d8f8cfd3&secure%5Btoken%5D=9c6c6db696a010a09eaebf2f042ce36f41639e840a1abd391d4efe4d9ce9923f&format=llm_user) ## IBM DataStage Integrations - [AutoSys Workload Automation](https://www.g2.com/products/autosys-workload-automation/reviews) - [Azure Blob Storage](https://www.g2.com/products/azure-blob-storage/reviews) - [IBM Cognos Analytics](https://www.g2.com/products/ibm-cognos-analytics/reviews) - [IBM Db2](https://www.g2.com/products/ibm-db2/reviews) - [IBM Netezza Performance Server](https://www.g2.com/products/ibm-netezza-performance-server/reviews) - [Microsoft SQL Server](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-sql-server/reviews) ## IBM DataStage Features **Management** - Reporting - Auditing **Functionality** - Data visualisation - Data transformation - Data migration - Process various formats - No-code functionality - Data manipulation - Analytics - Reporting **Functionality** - Extraction - Transformation - Loading - Automation - Scalability ## Top IBM DataStage Alternatives - [Pentaho Data Integration](https://www.g2.com/products/pentaho-data-integration/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (17 reviews) - [AWS Glue](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-glue/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (194 reviews) - [Azure Data Factory](https://www.g2.com/products/azure-data-factory/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (95 reviews)