Overview
Product Information on FME
What is FME?
FME Pricing
Overall experience with FME
“Integration, Geospatial Capability, and Usability Stand Out in FME Experience”
“FME Offers Intuitive Data Transformation but Has a Niche Talent Pool”
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Data Integration Tools
About Company
Company Description
Safe Software is an all-data integration solution company that has been helping organizations bring life to their data for almost 30 years with 25,000+ enterprise customers across 125+ countries.
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Key Insights
A Snapshot of What Matters - Based on Validated User Reviews
User Sentiment About FME
Reviewer Insights for: FME
Deciding Factors: FME Vs. Market Average
Performance of FME Across Market Features
FME Likes & Dislikes
The best features of FME are it's integration capability, ease of use, and geospatial capability. In my own role as a geospatial analyst, there are a few software's that can be used to interrogate and transform spatial datasets - FME has a strong set of tools that allow users to view and manipulate geospatial data alongside non geospatial data as well. This combination makes it a great tool when needing to work with both geospatial and non geospatial data. I can see a lot of opportunity for FME to be used outside of my roles usual tasks due to it being an 'everything tool'. My personal learnings on how to use FME have largely been through practical work on the job rather than training. The tool itself is easy to get into and use and has a great online community and documentation to help its users. It is a tool that can easily be self taught to a certain level being a low code - no code solution to building various solutions. Especially for FME Form which is the desktop version. The standout function to me is FME's ability to integrate - pulling data from one place and loading it to another, connecting to APIs, webhooks etc have been very useful functions. FME Flow makes automation and scheduling of these integrations a very powerful tool - enabling many live processes to run and streamlining workflows. If someone comes to me and says 'can FME do it?' I normally say yes (maybe with a few buts!)
The standard libraries for conversion are good performance wise, the graphical interface is intuitive. For people with a GIS background it is a very good tool.
What I like most about FME is how it supports complex GIS data processing through automation, clarity and flexibility. The standout features for me are: (1) The ability to build clear, step-by-step workflows making complex GIS processes easy to understand, maintain, and reuse. (2) FME excels at working with data from a wide range of sources and formats which is essential for my work in estate management as our data often comes from different systems and consultants. (3) Finally, the ability that once a workflow is built then it can be run repeatedly with confidence is the amazing!
The FME workbench interface can sometimes not be clear as to why something is failing, or why a field you are filling out is deemed as invalid. Often to tackle error messages and unknowns it is necessary to look at documentation on their site. Which is fine but I imagine tooltips or reminders in the UI would be helpful to improve ease of use. Perhaps the upcoming AI Assist in the newer version of FME will fill this gap. Using FME at a larger organisational level I would say does require someone in the business or a support partner to have a senior level understanding of FME to assist in best practice, debugging and maintenance. Particularly when using FME Flow.
Not a lot of people are familiar with the tool, it's difficult to find people in the market with FME as a skillset, this causes FME to be a liability at times as there's only a few people in the company that are familiar with it. This opposed to writing an ETL pipeline in Java/C# or Python which is much more generic and easier to recruit for.
FME has a steep learning curve. Also, as workflows grow in size and complexity, performance and resource usage need to be carefully managed.
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Peer Discussions
FME Reviews and Ratings
- Data Analyst50M-1B USDManufacturingReview Source
Integration, Geospatial Capability, and Usability Stand Out in FME Experience
FME has been an invaluable tool to my company. The overall experience with using this tool has been largely positive and we continue to use FME for more items as time goes on. At an enterprise level we use FME Flow for many live integrations, processes and our team also uses FME for desktop exercises and personal automations. - Data and Analytics ManagerGov't/PS/EdEducationReview Source
Handling Diverse Data Sources Is Efficient With FME Despite Performance Challenges
Overall, my experience with FME Platform has been positive. The ability to build clear, repeatable workflows has significantly reduced manual processing and improved consistency across my workflows - Lead GIS Specialist10B+ USDEnergy and UtilitiesReview Source
Daily FME User and I Love the Product!!!
I use both FME Form and an on-premise deployment of FME Flow for many different workflows . The major use cases include: 1.) Nightly workspaces to take base tables in the database, perform different types of analysis, and write that data back out to "presentation" layers that are used in maps, reports, further analysis, etc. 2.) Self-serve data download site for employees outside of our department. 3.) Self-serve data upload for users outside of our department (e.g. upload a spreadsheet, perform some type of data transformation, and output to a portal feature service or database table.) 4.) Automation of standardized reports. 5.) Loading data received from 3rd party vendors on a scheduled basis to our database. 6.) Automation of repetitive, time-consuming tasks. I also find myself using FME for almost any data analysis or data editing tasks; even one-off tasks where there is no need to automate or repeat the task. To me, FME has pretty much all of the functionality I need to perform my daily tasks and feels much less clunky and faster than opening and using any other tool. - GIS Specialist50M-1B USDConstructionReview Source
The Swiss Army Knife of Data Fixes
great customer service, functionally fantastic, reasonable pricing. Conferences are worth the time, especially post-Covid, lots of opportunities to chat with local users. - IT Associate50M-1B USDConstructionReview Source
Standard Tools Address Most Needs While Customization Handles Complex Challenges
The product just works. There are a lots of readers and writers in the product that I havent had to use but the ones that I do use work well for the most part.