Talend Open Studio Vs. Marjory

Talend Open Studio end of support

As we discussed, Talend announced the end of support to Talend Open Studio. This is a massive setback to all the organizations using Talend’s platform. From security risk to innovation halt (e.g., not benefitting from AI features), organizations are in jeopardy if they continue using Talend Open Studio.

If you are one of these organizations, you are most likely on the market, looking for alternatives.

There’s one thing you know: you need to switch. But the question is: switch to what?

There are so many alternatives in the market. It’s not easy knowing all of them. It takes time to analyze all of them. Time you don’t have. And this decision is a critical one. Switching to a tool that does not meet all of your needs can spell disaster. Fear not; we are here to help.

We are Marjory, one of the many alternatives. And we will tell you, in an objective and unbiased way, how we compare to Talend Open Studio.

In some things, we are as good. In others, we’re even better. And, yes, there are some things where we’re not as good. The point is, depending on what you need from Talend Open Studio, we may be a good alternative, or we may not.

Let’s find out!

What is Marjory

Marjory is an all-in-one middleware for data integration that is cost-effective and simplifies complex workflows.

Wow!

What a mouthful.

Let’s translate that. What it means is:

• We have a data integration platform
• That you can use to automate business processes
• Our platform contains multiple tools (iPaaS, ETL, EBO, etc.)
• It is actually quite affordable, compared to the other options
• It is robust, and it handles complex workflows quite easily

And in that mouthful, we were not able to squeeze in our cool monitoring capabilities. Or that we handle large volumes of data with incredible reliability.

This is what our dating profile would say. Now, let’s see if we match 💗

Talend Open Studio Vs. Marjory

Talend Open Studio has two main paradigms, ETL and ESB.

If you don’t speak nerd, ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load, while ESB stands for Enterprise Service Bus.

Most Talend Open Studio (TOS) users use it for their ETL.

As we said above, Marjory contains multiple paradigms. Namely iPaaS, ETL, ESB, EBO, and RPA. So, looking at the big picture, if you switch from TOS to Marjory, you will have all the tools you’re currently using and more! Now, let’s compare specific areas.

ETL

ETL is an area where TOS really excels. For build¹, TOS is one of the best solutions in the market. In fact, it is excellent. Using TOS is straightforward for mapping your workflows. They have a visual process, making it easy for people to design the workflow.

Marjory’s ETL module is excellent as well. With Marjory, you have everything you need to build, run, and monitor your dataflows. And bang for buck, you won’t find any tool in the market as good as Marjory for ETL. There are other good tools out there. But they are considerably more expensive.

Example of an ETL process with node setup.

‍

Building workflows: ease of use

Doing workflows in Talend is tech-heavy; you need to know what you’re doing.

With Marjory, it’s easier to produce high-quality data flows, even with less technical skills. Marjory makes the data flows scalable, observable, secure, and resilient by nature.

For someone using TOS, switching to Marjory is easy.

‍

Cost

Talend Open Studio is free. This means you used the tool to build your workflows and didn’t pay for it. But you do have to pay for the servers that execute your workflows.

So, even though you did not pay for TOS, the fact that you used that software forces you to spend on the execution. The proprietary expertise required to operate this platform must also be factored in. Talend is technically quite demanding to use, which means developers who operate TOS are costly.

The time required to build, run and maintain needs to be accounted too. That is part of TCO or Total Cost of Ownership. When evaluating the software cost, you can’t just look at the price tag. You need to identify and account for all sorts of hidden costs.

So, when you do the math, even though Talend Open Studio is free, it can cost you substantially, when you consider the Total Cost of Ownership.

Now, suppose you replace TOS with a paid alternative. In that case, you will have two costs: the build (Talend Open Studio alternative) and the run (the execution servers you are currently paying).

‍

‍

How much does Marjory cost?

If you select Marjory as an alternative to Talend Open Studio, you have both the build and the run components in the same solution.

Obviously, you need to know how much you would pay with Marjory before making that decision. And that will depend on the volume of execution units. Up to 10.000 execution units per month, Marjory is free! If you’re under that volume, you can replace Talend Open Studio with Marjory and save money, as you won’t need to pay for the execution servers - the Marjory platform has both components in the same solution.

If you are over the 10.000 execution units per month, Marjory is still priced very competitively compared to the market average. Contrary to the industry practice, we like to be transparent with our prices. You don’t need a call to get the price list. That’s nonsense.

Our prices vary with volume, based on execution units. If you need a call with our experts to determine how many execution units you require, that’s fine. Some clients have an accurate idea of how many execution units they use; others have no idea. We can help you calculate that, if you want.

When you compare how much you’re paying now with how much you would spend with Marjory, you must also factor in that Marjory gives you additional tools, not just ETL and ESB. You may already be using some of those tools, in which case you need to consider that cost in your analysis. You may not be utilizing it, but you still should assess the efficiency and productivity gains you would get by deploying such tools.

‍

‍

Observability, monitoring and logging

There are two premises that you need to be conscious of:

• Data integration tools are always business-critical. And that IT will always fail.

• No IT system doesn’t fail. The only code that doesn’t bug is the code that doesn’t exist. Every code will fail, eventually.

So you must architect for failure. Therefore, you need always to monitor to ensure everything is going well. And you need to know instantly or almost instantly when something goes wrong. That is the goal of data observability, monitoring, and logging.

This is an area where Talend Open Studio is at a clear disadvantage. TOS is very limited regarding observability, monitoring, and logging since it is a platform focused on the build aspect.  

Being able to immediately know when there is a problem with your data and identify where that problem is happening is absolutely critical. You need to fix those problems as soon as they occur. Imagine your stock management software and your e-commerce website are not communicating correctly with each other. Clients may be ordering products you don’t have to deliver. You will find out when your support system starts to get complaints from multiple clients. By then, there’s already an even bigger batch of clients experiencing the same problem.

Marjory is well-known for its observability, monitoring, and logging features. Let’s see an example.

‍

‍

ESB - Enterprise Service Bus

ESB is code-heavy in Talend Open Studio. Working with ESB in TOS requires knowledge of Apache and Karaf, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find developers with these skills.

Marjory, on the other hand, is exceptionally efficient in the way it handles ESB. Users only need to use graphical items; if you must customize your app integration layer, all you need to know is NodeJS.

‍

Apps and connectors

Talend Open Studio has a good portfolio of connectors that you can use to integrate your applications. Data integration software editors can't integrate all the existing applications. What editors tend to do is to have the most important ones and give the tools for users to integrate the ones they don’t have. Talend does this, naturally.

When searching for an alternative to Talend Open Studio, you need to confirm if they have the applications you use. If they don’t, you must consider how complex integrating applications into that platform is. This may vary substantially from one editor to another. Don’t forget to check if they have documentation. Inadequate or non-existent documentation is a red flag. You also need to take into account if, in your organization, you have the skills to do this. Some software editors are open to developing these integrations for you. Inquire about that when searching for a replacement for Talend Open Studio.

Marjory has a decent portfolio of connectors; although less extensive than TOS, we try to cover the most important ones. We compensate for not having as many apps and connectors as TOS with precise documentation and the ability to incorporate client’s requirements into our roadmap. Additionally, if our users need to auto-generate and customize their apps, they can easily do that with a simple OpenAPI file.

‍

Additional tools

As mentioned, Talend Open Studio includes ETL and ESB.

With Marjory, in addition to ETL and ESB, you also have iPaaS, RPA, and EBO inside the same platform. This means you can centralize all your data integration workflows, regardless of the paradigm used. And all the workflows will benefit from the monitoring and logging capabilities previously mentioned.

‍

Example of Invoicing OCR Process with analyze of new invoices reseceived with Mindee and add to new line on a specific Excel sheet

‍

Talend Open Studio migration

Once you selected which platform to replace Talend Open Studio with, you need to start thinking about the migration from TOS to the new platform.

We are helping organizations switch from Talend Open Studio to Marjory. We have resources and documentation that can assist you in making this transition.

‍

Contact us!

You have a question about your migration, or you want to know if Marjory fit with your project? Ask your question, our expert will get back to you!