The data management landscape just shifted—again.
In June 2025, Salesforce confirmed its intent to acquire Informatica, signaling a major change for the future of Informatica’s roadmap, pricing, and independence. Rising licensing costs, rushed cloud migration timelines, and concerns about vendor lock-in are pushing IT leaders to explore alternatives.
According to Gartner:
“Informatica customers must quickly address potential changes to product roadmap, existing contracts and licensing, customer support, and Informatica’s long-term status as an independent software vendor (ISV).”
Informatica is expected to sunset support for its legacy on-premises platforms—PowerCenter, Axon, and core MDM—by early 2026. With the shift to Salesforce’s cloud ecosystem, organizations may also encounter significant increases in licensing costs, potentially as high as 40–50%, based on trends seen in similar past acquisitions. If your organization isn’t cloud-ready, this creates both budget and operational risks.
If you’re an Informatica customer or evaluating MDM solutions, now is the time to reassess your options. This article compares Semarchy and Informatica across core criteria and highlights why Semarchy is becoming the go-to alternative for organizations that want flexibility, transparency, and faster time-to-value.
Why it matters more than ever
Your master data is the foundation of every decision, campaign, and strategy. But poor data quality still costs U.S. businesses over $3 trillion annually. An MDM platform should solve that, not complicate it.
Now, with Informatica’s acquisition in motion, many organizations are facing:
- Forced cloud migrations with little time to prepare
- Uncertainty about future product support
- Concerns about vendor consolidation and lock-in
Let’s break down how Semarchy compares and why it’s now the clear alternative.
2025 head-to-head Semarchy vs. Informatica comparison
To see how Semarchy beats Informatica across features, support, and business value, according to real users, download SoftwareReviews head-to-head comparison or keep reading below.
Data modeling: flexibility that grows with you
Data modeling is a key part of any MDM strategy. By creating a visual representation of your data, you can understand the data types in your system and the relationships between different data assets.
Your business needs will inform your data model, so the MDM platform you choose must be flexible, allowing you to adapt your model as your organization evolves.
Semarchy
The Semarchy Data Platform features adaptive data modeling capabilities, utilizing a ‘whiteboard-style’ approach. This means you can design and iterate data models quickly in response to changing requirements. Semarchy’s data modeling tools help you make sense of complex data landscapes. Visualization tools also help non-technical stakeholders understand the relationships between data.
Informatica
Informatica uses a data catalog to automate data discovery, curation, and lineage. AI-powered data curation enriches data by adding context to data through automated classification, association, and recommendations. Automated, end-to-end data lineage helps you understand the relationships between data assets.
The verdict
Both Semarchy and Informatica strive to make data discovery and modeling easy. However, Semarchy has the edge according to real-world users. Gartner rates Semarchy’s data modeling capabilities at 4.5/5, while Informatica is rated slightly lower at 4.4/5 (July 2024).
Data governance: trust starts with transparency
Good information governance is essential for storing and using data safely. As data protection and privacy standards get stricter, you need an MDM platform that ensures compliance and security while making it easy to use your data to hit business goals.
Semarchy
The Semarchy Data Platform supports robust data governance, ensuring the accuracy, consistency, and security of your critical data:
- Data Stewardship: Easily define data roles, quality standards, and access permissions to keep data secure and accurate at every interaction.
- Data Lineage and Auditing: Get complete visibility into the history of your data, from source to destination. Lineage visualization tools enable you to track modifications to data, and automated audit reports allow you to quickly demonstrate compliance.
- Custom Governance Policies: Develop and enforce information governance policies tailored to your organization’s needs, ensuring compliance with industry standards.
- Data Quality and Consistency: Get data you can trust and share across your organization. Semarchy focuses heavily on data quality, with user-friendly tools for data profiling, cleansing, and validation.
Informatica
Informatica MDM also aims to enhance data quality and security through its data governance tools. Informatica leans on its CLAIRE AI engine to enrich governance capabilities, but Gartner warns that support for on-prem governance tools may wane quickly. Salesforce’s cloud-first model could further deprioritize support for standalone governance workflows.
The verdict
Both platforms offer enterprise-ready governance, with both Semarchy and Informatica getting a 4.2/5 rating for data governance support (2025).
Deployment and integration: fast, flexible, and future-proof
You want your MDM platform up and running quickly. Fast deployment and seamless integration are essential for getting maximum value from your data in the shortest possible time.
Semarchy
Semarchy’s Data Platform has an excellent record of delivering rapid time-to-value:
- 80% of Semarchy users measure ROI with a fully functioning solution in under 12 weeks.
- Semarchy’sRapid Delivery Blueprint provides a pathway to get your MDM solution in place quickly. 100% of Semarchy users have met their implementation goals since it was introduced.
- Semarchy’s PTO and Technical Services Team have over 140 years of combined experience, ensuring you get up and running smoothly.
Semarchy has a range of pre-built connectors that ensure seamless interoperability with third-party systems. Semarchy also offers an iterative implementation process, keeping you in control of the cost and scope of your project.
Informatica
Informatica also promises a low total cost of ownership and flexible implementation. Similar to Semarchy’s iterative process, Informatica uses a volume-based/pay-for-what-you-need pricing model that lets you scale your MDM strategy to new use cases. Informatica uses its AI engine to optimize costs and save time, and a large collection of APIs lets you connect to third-party applications.
Gartner notes that Informatica’s aggressive push toward IDMC cloud products and away from PowerCenter and other on-prem options has caused concern. End-of-support dates (e.g., PowerCenter 10.5 by March 2026) mean many users are being pushed into rushed transitions or costly extended support plans
The verdict
Both platforms promise easy, cost-effective implementation, but Semarchy stands out as an excellent Informatica alternative, especially when it comes to customer service and rapid time-to-value. This is reflected in the higher ratings Semarchy receives for deployment and integration as of 2025:
- Semarchy gets 4.5/5 for ease of deployment. Informatica gets 4.2/5 (Gartner).
- Semarchy is rated at 4.7/5 for integration. Informatica is rated at 4.2/5 (Gartner).
- Semarchy receives 83% for ease of implementation. Informatica gets 76% (Software Reviews).
Customer experience: a platform and a partner
What truly sets Semarchy apart isn’t just the product. It’s the people and partnership behind it. From day one, Semarchy invests in your success with a high-touch support model, proven implementation services, and a collaborative approach that continues long after go-live.
Our professional services team brings decades of combined experience across data architecture, migrations, and training. Using our Rapid Delivery Blueprint, 1000% of customers meet their implementation goals in the last 12 months. We don’t just hand off the software and walk away. Our experts work closely with your team to ensure seamless onboarding and long-term performance.
Once you’re up and running, our support experience is just as strong. Customers benefit from named support contacts, fast response SLAs, and direct access to experienced engineers, not tiered escalation paths. For critical issues, we respond within one hour and provide fixes within five business days. Our support portal also includes a robust knowledge base, guided tutorials, and forums to help your team self-serve when needed.
And the results speak for themselves: Semarchy customers report a 60% reduction in ongoing maintenance costs, 80% achieve time-to-value in less than three months, and satisfaction scores consistently rank among the highest in the industry. Whether you’re deploying SaaS, on-prem, in the cloud, or natively in Snowflake, Semarchy supports your platform and your people.
Taking control with Semarchy: a real-world example
Semarchy MDM gives you a single source of truth for your data assets. You get accurate, secure data you can use to improve decision-making, drive efficiency, and reach customers.
Over 400 companies worldwide use Semarchy to manage over 1 trillion master records. Users include leading brands from retail, manufacturing, financial services, and education.
For example, Brown-Forman, known for labels like Jack Daniels and Woodford Reserve, needed to master huge quantities of product data from multiple locations. The company used Semarchy to match and centralize data from over 170 markets. This led to faster workflows and better business intelligence.
Thanks to Semarchy MDM, Brown-Forman benefits from:
- Faster project delivery thanks to a central hub of trusted data.
- More effective pricing strategies based on accurate data for each market.
- Improved decision-making thanks to data-driven insights into each brand.
See Semarchy’s success stories library to discover how other organizations drive growth with better data management.
What the Salesforce acquisition means for you
If you’re an Informatica customer, here’s what Gartner recommends:
- In the short term: Demand clarity around licensing, support, and product roadmap. Expect pressure to migrate to IDMC and the Salesforce ecosystem.
- In the long term: Start evaluating alternatives. Gartner specifically warns about accelerated EOS timelines and reduced R&D focus as Salesforce rationalizes product portfolios.
In their words:
“If you don’t want to continue using Informatica’s on-premises products, begin evaluating alternatives as soon as possible, as migration timelines may be short.”
See how Semarchy compares to other Informatica alternatives
Read more head-to-head comparisons to learn about other Semarchy and Informatica competitors:
Why Semarchy is the best Informatica alternative
Semarchy’s user-friendly MDM platform stands out for flexible data modeling, robust data governance, easy deployment, rapid time-to-value, and outstanding support. Importantly, the platform is highly scalable, with an iterative implementation process that puts you in control of the cost and scope of your project.
You can deploy Semarchy in weeks, not months, allowing you to quickly drive ROI with data-driven insights.
Get in touch for a proof-of-value discussion. You can also request a personalized Semarchy demo. You’ll see the platform in action and get a walkthrough of how you can use it to drive growth.
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