In November 2023, Talend announced that Talend Open Studio, its open-source platform, would be discontinued. The decision will become effective by January 31, 2024.
This has left the community puzzled, angry, and unprepared!
Puzzled because it was not expected. Angry because many businesses have their operations based on this platform, and they feel Talend pulled the rug on them. And unprepared because, since they were not expecting this to happen, most users did not have an alternative plan in place. And that is what everybody is doing now: looking for an alternative to Talend Open Studio. We will help you with that.
But before diving into the alternatives to Talend Open Studio, let’s cover the basics.
What is Talend Open Studio?
Talend Open Studio is a free data integration solution from Talend. It is most known for its suite of ETL tools.
ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load, and it is used to grab (extract) information from multiple data sources, normalize (transform) said data into a consistent format, and then deliver it (load) to a new destiny, like another application.
Talend is also known for its paid tools, like the Talend Data Fabric suite, which is vastly more powerful than Talend Open Studio. It is also considerably more expensive 😁
Talend Open Studio consists of:
- Talend Open Studio for Data Integration. This is the main module to manage ETL processes.
- Talend Open Studio for Big Data. Similar, but for much larger data volumes
- Talend Open Studio for ESB (Enterprise Service Bus). Used to manage APIs (SOAP, REST)
- Talend Open Studio for Data Quality. A data visualization tool.
- Talend Open Studio for MDM (Master data records). A client-server framework in which results are delivered to a web framework.
What are the implications of Talend discontinuing Talend Open Studio?
There are multiple implications to the end of free support. First and foremost, you must understand that there will be no more updates. And that alone is serious enough to make you consider switching. Any security issue or breach found in the code will not be patched. You are leaving your organization exposed to attacks and vulnerable to exploits. Suffice to say, this is as high as it gets in any IT team risk scale.
It’s not just security, even though that is already a strong enough reason to move to an alternative data integration platform. Think about improvements. Technology evolves extremely fast. New possibilities and new requirements arise regularly. Software that is no longer updated cannot benefit from new technologies or features. Let’s think about AI for a second. This is a significant wave of innovation that is just starting. If you use Talend Open Studio, you will not benefit from this technological breakthrough. Again, that alone would be a good enough reason to switch to another data integration platform.
It’s not all bad, though. For instance, if you are only running existing flows and have no new projects, your only concern is the security risk. This is a scenario where you have your workflows created and running. You don’t need to change them, and you don’t need to add new workflows. Not benefiting from further improvements is not a dealbreaker for you in the short term. Your only concern is security. And you need to migrate. Just not tomorrow. It would help if you considered auditing your system.
If you’re still building new workflows and/or modifying them, you really need to consider migrating. Talend Open Studio will stop making improvements, so maintaining new SaaS applications and protocols will be harder and harder.
What are the alternatives to Talend Open Studio?
Migrate to Talend commercial tools?
The logical alternative would to consider Talend. However, if you’re using the free version, switching to Talend’s paid version will sound absurd. It would be surprising if Talend expects free users to convert into paying users because the price gap is huge. On top of that, it’s not the same solution. There are many more components in the paid version, which sounds good but is not necessarily necessary. If you’re not going to use those components, you’re paying for something you don’t need.
Additionally, it’s possible that your system won’t work on the paid solution. What is free with Talend is the build part, the part of creating the workflows. What triggers those workflows is developed by the client. So, you may not be able to switch to the paid version of Talend because what is included in that section is the run segment of Talend, meaning the triggering of the workflows. So, Talend Open Studio being discontinued probably won’t bring many paying clients to Talend.
Forks?
Some companies are going to do forks based on Talend Open Studio. In fact, we have already seen some announcements about that. This may seem a good or easy solution because your changes will be minimal. Someone will continue updating the code. However, we advise against this solution.
Expecting these forks to be good enough is a risk. Expecting these companies to maintain these forks is another risk. Talend, an industry giant, stopped supporting its open-source product. Why would a smaller company be able to do better?
Marjory
Our very own data integration platform is known for its ETL capabilities.
In fact, Marjory is the all-in-one middleware for data integration, combining ETL, EBO, iPaas, BPM, ESB and RPA in one single platform.
Companies such as Kiabi use it precisely for that. You can try Marjory and see if it addresses your needs. You can even use it for free, up to 10.000 execution units per month. It’s a solid ETL solution, easier to implement when compared to Talend and it even brings all the other tools for data integration. It’s like the Swiss army knife of data integration.
If you want to know more, you can learn about Marjory here.
If you want to know more, read our article comparing Talend Open Studio and Marjory to find the best alternative.
Conclusion
Talend Open Studio is being discontinued. You should undoubtedly migrate! The only question is when.
It may be urgent, you may have a few months. But rest assured, you need to migrate.
You can set up a conversation with our data integration experts if you feel you need help. We are happy to give you an objective and impartial overview, help you understand the situation, and figure out the right move for you.
