It's nice to have a free ETL solution. But let's not overstate what Free and Open Source mean, here. (Good luck if you think you can build the whole studio from source.) The free versions of Talend tools come with limited functionality, including what looks like a deliberately crippled Eclipse Workbench. Basic features of the workbench like custom perspectives have been more or less hidden or removed. The UI can be a real pain. Some operations have unpredictable behaviours. Sometimes you have to close a job and open it again to get it working. Sometimes you will break things and won't be able to undo your changes, and there's no versioning in the free version (protip: make backups of your workspace). The welcome screen regularly nags you about trying the cloud version and creating an account. Projects are not backwards compatible. Editing a project on a higher version will lock you out of older versions. Freely available documentation is spread around forums and PDF files, and is not consistent across products and versions. Overall, the free version is super useful, but also really frustrating to use. Know that if you go down that rabbit hole, sooner or later you'll find yourself considering the $1200 a month subscription.
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It's nice to have a free ETL solution.
But let's not overstate what Free and Open Source mean, here.
(Good luck if you think you can build the whole studio from source.)
The free versions of Talend tools come with limited functionality, including what looks like a deliberately crippled Eclipse Workbench. Basic features of the workbench like custom perspectives have been more or less hidden or removed.
The UI can be a real pain. Some operations have unpredictable behaviours. Sometimes you have to close a job and open it again to get it working.
Sometimes you will break things and won't be able to undo your changes, and there's no versioning in the free version (protip: make backups of your workspace).
The welcome screen regularly nags you about trying the cloud version and creating an account.
Projects are not backwards compatible. Editing a project on a higher version will lock you out of older versions.
Freely available documentation is spread around forums and PDF files, and is not consistent across products and versions.
Overall, the free version is super useful, but also really frustrating to use.
Know that if you go down that rabbit hole, sooner or later you'll find yourself considering the $1200 a month subscription.