Title: Technical Differences Between ArcGIS Data Interoperability and FME Form for Large Data Volumes, Advanced Validation, and Maintenance Costs

​@francisco_1988 here’s a blog article from the ESRI Data Interoperability Community site for starters. The article may answer some of your questions.

https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-data-interoperability-blog/how-does-data-interoperability-relate-to-fme/ba-p/1196068

Tagging ​@bruceharold here.

Hello Francisco

Thank you for your questions.

I’ll provide some more details not discussed in the community post shared by my colleague Renato.

I invite any Safers to correct anything I get wrong, or provide more insights.

ArcGIS Data Interoperability (DI) is built from a branch of FME Form and there are no fundamental differences between DI and FME Form at the same engine build when using the apps the products deliver, or how processing is done.

Working with millions of records is an expected and supported practice, for example see here I load 100 million features into a hosted feature service in ArcGIS Online (note: this is an old sample, I might do things differently now).  Big data can be bigger than memory and spill to disk if you’re using any blocking transformers, this is the same for DI and Form.

DI doesn’t have limitations versus Form on a desktop machine when working with databases or geometry, but the automation stories differ. For DI, you can use the ArcGIS Pro geoprocessing tool scheduled run option or use Windows task scheduler to run fme.exe with workspace and parameter arguments.  Form supports task scheduler also.  Both products have companion server products (ArcGIS Enterprise, FME Flow) that provide scheduling capability and other automation options.

To the best of my knowledge FME Form is a single-threaded engine, parallelization in DI and Form can be achieved with the WorkspaceRunner transformer (as in my sample above) or when using HTTPCaller or OpenAPICaller transformers when using a web service.  Parallel processing is also available for custom transformers as described in this article.  DI tools can be shared to ArcGIS Enterprise as web tools if scaling is required - for example getting some processing power into the hands of colleagues who do not have DI, or running an integration on a cadence you cannot support on a desktop machine.

DI tools by default run in Pro’s geoprocessing thread, from Pro 3.6 onwards you can run tools in the foreground thread which brings some gains but both products let you run a workspace using the Quick Translator app to get a job done without the overhead of the Workbench user interface, if you’re not addicted to watching feature counts during processing like me 😀.  While writing I ran a tool that reads a million features from ArcGIS Online and in Workbench it takes 1 minute and in Quick Translator it took 45 seconds (I’m prototyping a new query approach if you don’t see that speed).

DI supports creating custom transformers, custom formats, using the PythonCaller/Creator transformers and the same logging and debug environment as Form.  The ArcGIS Pro Python environment is always available with DI.

Hi ​@francisco_1988 great questions, and I’ll chime in to support what Bruce and Renato have already said. I’ll also add that although there is no technical difference between ArcGIS Data Interoperability (DI) and FME Form, the main difference lies in who you contact for support and what versions of the product are available. For more information about DI you can read our article here: https://support.safe.com/hc/en-us/articles/25407382051597-ArcGIS-Data-Interoperability-and-FME

ArcGIS Data Interoperability

• Supported & licensed through ESRI
• The version of DI is dependent on the version of ArcGIS Pro 

FME Form

• Supported & licensed through Safe Software 
• Access to all versions & patches

Which leads to your last question about costs, licensing, and maintenance. From Safe depending on your license model support is included in the subscription cost, or as a percentage of the license cost. If you would like to receive a quote please reach out to our sales team, and they can break down this more for you: https://fme.safe.com/contact-sales-pricing/

Thanks Evie, as always!