I was checking out importing and exporting data from Salesforce. Salesforce provides reasonable documentation at their trail-head and it’s worth the time to understand what’s available with the platform. These solutions provide point solutions to move data in and out of Salesforce. If on the other hand your use case requires additional requirements for data sources, cleaning, performance, error recovery, auditing, (i.e. enterprise type features), look on.
As I looked around. I pulled up the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration tools as well as Google searches for available options. The ones that caught my interest were:
Talend provides data movement & data quality tools. Gartner classifies Telend as a leader. Each has an open source component as well as a paid one. A beginning comparison matrix is here.
Informatica — Offers a free data wizard. Beyond the free offering, there is a PaaS offering as well as the tried and true PowerCenter (on premise) offering. Gartner classifies Informatica as their top executing leader.
Gartner reviewed SSIS from Microsoft, which is available on premise. The upcoming PaaS offering Data Factory v2 (in preview) also seems quite interesting. Gartner classifies Microsoft as a well executing challenger.
Dataloader.io — free version for a limited number of records. You can increase the number of records or move to MuleSoft (it’s underlying technology) for enterprise use cases.
JitterBit — Free for a small number of use cases, and can upgrade to Harmony for additional use cases and performance.
As always, in making decisions between products, I suggest to:
1) Define the use cases.
2) Reduce the list of vendors using price, customer support (and other criteria).
3) Execute a proof of concept using your data with one or two vendors.
4) Run ROI / TCO calculations.