SnapLogic vs. DreamFactory: An iPaaS Comparison

Tony Harris - October 15, 2019

SnapLogic vs. DreamFactory

Deciding between SnapLogic vs. DreamFactory for your iPaaS software? Compare SnapLogic alternatives like DreamFactory by pricing and features to find the best iPaaS software for you.

Introduction

Companies of all sizes and industries are looking to leverage new technologies in order to digitally transform their business. One of the biggest digital trends of the past few years is the growth of the “as a service” delivery model, in which IT tools and products are provisioned to the customer over the Internet, rather than on the company’s in-house servers.

iPaaS (integration platform as a service) is an “as a service” offering that consists of cloud-based tools for connecting software applications in multiple IT environments. The goal of iPaaS platforms is to simplify and even automate the process of developing and deploying software without the need to build complicated integrations.

According to projections by IT research firm Gartner, the global iPaaS market will grow from $1 billion in 2017 to over $4 billion in 2022, with an estimated annual growth rate of 30 percent. It’s little wonder that iPaaS solutions are so in-demand when enterprises are using an average of 508 software applications that often need to communicate and exchange information.

SnapLogic and DreamFactory are two popular options for iPaaS software. While SnapLogic is only for cloud-based deployments, DreamFactory can be deployed in both the cloud and on-premises. Yet the differences between these two alternatives don’t stop there—so how can you decide whether DreamFactory or SnapLogic is the right fit for your business?

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What is SnapLogic?

SnapLogic is a software company and iPaaS provider that offers a variety of products for simplifying the task of cloud integration. The basic unit of SnapLogic is the “Snap,” which is a prebuilt connector that serves as the building block of an integration pipeline. Snaps may perform actions such as reading data from a file, connection applications, or moving messages into a database.

In particular, the SnapLogic API Management software is intended to convert complex integration pipelines into user-friendly REST APIs. Thanks to its feature-rich offerings, SnapLogic was named as a “Visionary” in IT research firm Gartner’s 2019 Data Integration Magic Quadrant report.

What is DreamFactory?

DreamFactory is a software company that offers an open-source API management solution for mobile and web applications. As mentioned above, DreamFactory can build REST (Representational State Transfer) APIs for both on-premises and cloud-based applications.

As an enterprise-grade “API as a service” platform, DreamFactory is capable of running on-premises, in the cloud, or hosted on remote servers. DreamFactory is also client-agnostic, which means that it can work with technologies including XML, JSON, jQuery, and AngularJS and for use cases including server-to-server communications and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

SnapLogic: Features and Benefits

SnapLogic describes its Intelligent Integration Platform (IIP) as a “self-service, AI-powered platform that integrates data from any source, in any environment, and at any speed.”

There are more than 500 prebuilt Snaps that come with the SnapLogic platform, making it extremely easy for users to get up and running. Just a few of the supported technologies are:

Amazon Redshift
Amazon SQS
Cassandra
Facebook
Hadoop
LinkedIn
Microsoft SQL Server
MySQL
Oracle
RabbitMQ
Salesforce
SAP
Tableau
Twitter

According to SnapLogic, the platform can help reduce integration complexity by 40 percent or greater, while reducing integration development time by up to 80 percent. SnapLogic also comes equipped with data science capabilities for building self-service machine learning models that help you get more out of your enterprise data sources.

DreamFactory: Features and Benefits

For its part, DreamFactory provides its own set of features and benefits that makes it an attractive choice for API management.

Unlike SnapLogic, DreamFactory is an open-source API management solution. This provides benefits such as greater flexibility and transparency and easier customizability. While the open-source version of DreamFactory is free for all users, the company also offers paid Silver and Gold tiers with more connectors and features and around-the-clock technical support.

DreamFactory is capable of automatically turning databases into REST APIs, including popular technologies such as:

Cassandra
IBM Db2
Microsoft SQL Server
MongoDB
MySQL
Oracle
PostgreSQL
Redis
SQLite

DreamFactory includes the essential API security features that you need to keep your communications and data safe: user management, role-based access control, JSON web tokens, and application API keys. In addition, DreamFactory’s Silver and Gold tiers offer advanced API management features, such as custom and event-based logging and API rate limiting at the instance, role, user, and endpoint levels.

SnapLogic vs. DreamFactory: Making the Choice

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably having difficulties choosing between SnapLogic and DreamFactory—and for good reason. Both DreamFactory and SnapLogic are mature, reliable alternatives with a wealth of features and many satisfied users to back them up.

To further analyze the choice between SnapLogic and DreamFactory, let’s check out what the people whose opinions matter most have to say: the user bases of the two products themselves.

According to the business software review website G2 Crowd, both DreamFactory and SnapLogic are thought of highly by their users. DreamFactory has an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars, while SnapLogic has an average rating of 4 out of 5 stars.

SnapLogic receives high marks for its simplicity and ease of use. Reviewer Rajesh PRM. says that “SnapLogic is well suited for almost every data flow. They have a great set of connectors and an intuitive UI, and it can get set up in very few steps.” According to reviewer Kory K., “simple data transfers are extremely easy and quick… literally a handful of Snaps and a couple specifics can load data from source to target in a few minutes!”

However, G2 Crowd user reviews testify that SnapLogic is not without its faults. Kory K. also mentions that “more complex transformations may require significant planning and rework to ensure clean, easy-to-understand pipelines. We have also had several issues with pipeline hangs and job failures due to network timeouts during job startup and execution.”

Other users agree that SnapLogic can be challenging to work with for more complicated tasks, citing issues with the platform’s support and documentation. One review says that “when I am struggling trying to build something out, there isn’t a great way to reach out to a community of SnapLogic users to see how they were able to solve the problem.” Another user complains that after experiencing an issue, “the support team response was very primitive. They were not able to identify the issue or even point at the right direction. Since this is a fairly new product there are bugs when you go deeper, and the support team is not skilled.”

Meanwhile, DreamFactory also wins praise from G2 Crowd reviewers who are pleased with the software’s ease of use and the improvements that it can bring to their business. Reviewer Junior C. says that “with DreamFactory, it was possible to envelop the legacy systems that we have, adopting a granular strategy in the migration to microservices. Centralizing access control with support for several roles for different types of users and applications was a significant milestone for us. We reduced implementation time and kept the team lean.”

Steve W. echoes these words, writing: “Think of the true cost of DIY APIs and the cost of other API management tools. For us, DreamFactory cost in a year what an API team would have in a month, and what slower API managers would cost in two months.”

Related Reading: API Cost Calculator

While both DreamFactory and SnapLogic are strong choices for your next API management project, you don’t need to use both of them—so picking the right one comes down to the features and priorities that are most important to you.

For example, DreamFactory is the obvious best choice if you need an API management solution that runs entirely on-premises (since SnapLogic cannot), or one that is open-source (since SnapLogic is not). The feature sets of DreamFactory and SnapLogic are also different. If you want to produce GraphQL APIs instead of REST, for example, then DreamFactory includes GraphQL support where SnapLogic does not.

No matter which service you end up going with, DreamFactory’s team of integration experts can help advise you based on your business objectives and requirements. Get in touch with us today to set up a chat or a 14-day hosted free trial with full access to the DreamFactory platform.

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