Informatica Data Catalog Pricing: Estimate the Total Cost of Ownership

Updated April 25th, 2024

Share this article

Are you considering implementing the Informatica Data Catalog for your organization? Ever wondered what it’s going to cost you? This article will take you through the total cost of ownership of your data catalog — and the nuances of Informatica Data Catalog pricing.

nasdaq-quote-for-atlan

Looking for a data catalog with an ROI you can present to your CDO? Atlan is designed for adoption and embedded with automation. It helps you save time, cut cloud costs, and make faster, better decisions that lead to revenue.

Get Atlan Pricing →

Table of contents #

  1. What is Informatica data catalog?
  2. Informatica data catalog pricing: How much will it cost you?
  3. Informatica data catalog pricing: Total cost of ownership
  4. Is Informatica worth the price?
  5. Related reads

What is Informatica data catalog? #

Informatica has been around in the data business for over three decades. They have various data services under their Intelligent Data Management Cloud offering. Some of the critical areas where these services work are:

  • Data integration and engineering
  • Data quality and observability
  • Data cataloging
  • Data, API, and application integration
  • Master data management

In April 2021, Informatica introduced the Cloud Data Governance and Catalog service to address an increasing demand for data asset search, discovery, and governance in the modern data stack.

Informatica data catalog pricing: How much will it cost you? #

All Informatica products follow their IPU-based (Informatica Processing Unit) pricing.

It isn’t clear what precisely an IPU is — how much and what type of compute and storage it represents. One hint we got was from the AWS Marketplace listing of the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud, where 120 IPUs per month cost USD 1,29,600 a year. The best you can do is to find bits and pieces of information from different places and try to stitch together a consistent view of pricing.

Again, on the AWS Marketplace, you can see the cost of spinning up Informatica for up to 50 metadata resources is USD 1,00,000 a year. Another source says that the subscription for 100 users cost can start from USD 1,50,000 a year.

CDW, a Fortune 500 full-stack technology implementation company, lists Informatica’s licensing fees for up to 1800 metadata resources to be USD 5,31,149.99. This is just the licensing cost, not including cloud compute or infrastructure components.

None of these pricing references came from Informatica’s official page. The ones we have found range from a hundred thousand dollars to over half a million dollars.

Informatica data catalog pricing: Total cost of ownership #

Although licensing is the most obvious cost, we’ll need to zoom out a little to understand the total cost of a data catalog.

Implementing a data catalog means that users across your organization will use the catalog to find, trust, and share data assets daily. This requires the catalog to interface with all data-related components of your data architecture.

In addition, a data catalog also requires all data users to be onboarded to have a consistent experience for accessing and using data.

There are several aspects of pricing that you need to take into account when evaluating a data catalog, such as:

  1. Base licensing and hosting costs
  2. Implementation costs
  3. Training costs
  4. Ongoing support and maintenance costs

Let’s explore each aspect further.

1. Base licensing and hosting cost #


The base pricing of data catalogs usually involves a mix of the following variables: number of active users, number of administrators, connectors, APIs, and storage. Informatica Data Catalog also charges separately for different services it provides, such as:

  • Storage of data assets in the catalog
  • Metadata record consumption
  • Scanner usage for profiling, discovery, and classification
  • Scanner usage with an advanced serverless option

Informatica’s data catalog tracks metrics, such as, daily assets stored, compute units, and the number of API calls. An example of how Informatica tracks usage is shown below:

  • Scaler: Daily Assets Stored
  • Metric: Per One Hundred Thousand Assets
  • IPU Per Metric Unit: 0.83 for the first 500,000 Assets and 0.067 for > 500,000 Assets

This is only one aspect of the data catalog. Every function and service, as mentioned at the beginning of this section, has a separate pricing structure. You can find the finer details in Informatica’s CDS & PDS document.

One of the users who had a positive experience with the data catalog still had to call out how Informatica “… is a resource-intensive tool and costly too.” Another user said that “the pricing is a bit on the higher end.” In addition to Informatica’s pricing, other users have had some challenges around data lineage and the product’s overall performance.

2. Implementation costs #


Setting up a data catalog can be quite time-consuming. It could take anywhere from weeks to months of engineering effort, depending upon the various integrations you want to have in place, along with any customizations specific to your business needs.

Informatica doesn’t offer a DIY implementation option, so you might need experienced professionals (typically system integrators) to do it for you. This not only costs you more in the beginning but also creates a dependency on third parties for your implementation.

3. Training costs #


Once the tool is in place, you must train all data users across the organization. The cost of training varies greatly because it depends on how complex the tool is to learn and use and how long it takes for a generic data user to get onboarded and start benefiting from the data catalog.

With some tools that don’t have clear documentation and guides, training can be a continuous process as you’ll keep discovering issues and looking for solutions.

4. Ongoing support and maintenance costs #


Data catalog implementations can get out of hand, especially when the DIY setup isn’t easy, or there isn’t enough easy-to-follow documentation. That’s where you’ll need assistance from the service provider.

One user described that their problem with the Informatica data catalog is that it “crashes often, resulting in prolonged downtimes. Searching the catalog can be slow, even if cluster recommendations comply with Informatica’s guidelines. Scanner jobs often fail even with container sizes specified per Informatica’s recommendations.”

Having these issues puts you in a spot of bother not only because you’re too dependent on the support team but also because it costs you a lot more time, effort, and money. This complexity can rise very quickly with the number of integrations and resources you’re managing with Informatica.

Is Informatica worth the price? #

Although data cataloging is the foundational piece for modern data catalogs, it supports many other features like data lineage, collaboration, governance, and more, in line with the demands and requirements of organizations today. So, it doesn’t help if you’ve got to pay separately to use all of these features.

Several consumers feel Informatica’s metadata management and data lineage capabilities need work. Some customers feel that it isn’t scalable for legacy systems, especially regarding lineage. Various customers have also suggested that it is not easy for new users to get across the UI, which goes back to the cost of training and onboarding new users to the catalog.

We created Atlan to deliver a modern data catalog that empowers customers with all the tools they need for searching, discovering, and governing data in their organization. Atlan supports a DIY setup and an easy-to-use UI that reduces ramp-up time and total cost of ownership. We will work with you to create a pricing package that delivers a solid return on your investment.

Book your personalized demo today.

Share this article

[Website env: production]