In the landscape of data management, we are assisting at the shift from traditional ETL processes to the ELT methodology. With that letter position exchanged lies a significant conceptual shift. Indeed, placing data transformation at the end of the data pipeline allows more agile data handling speeding up business processes. As a result, ELT automation tools, such as Fivetran and Airbyte, have emerged. Today, we delve into a comparative analysis of these two leading platforms. (Check this blog for a for a higher-level comparison!)
Fivetran
Fivetran is a cloud-based data integration platform that enables businesses to move data from various sources to others. In such a way it is possible to gather data into a single easy-to-access destination such as a data warehouse. Moreover, Fivetran simplifies the process of setting up and maintaining data pipelines by providing pre-built connectors to hundreds of different data sources. This allows organizations to focus on extracting valuable data insights, rather than spending time and resources on complex integration tasks. In addition, FIvetran allows to apply some data cleaning and transformation steps in between the transfer process.
Airbyte
Airbyte is an open-source data integration platform having similar goals and feautures of Fivetran. It aims to provide a flexible, extensible, and cost-effective solution for data integration, particularly for modern cloud-based architectures. Airbyte is known for its ease of use, with a simple web-based interface for managing connectors and configuring data pipelines. Additionally, Airbyte is fully customizable and extensible. It allows users to create custom connectors and adapters for specific use cases or data sources.
What’s different?
The main difference lies in the type of tool, i.e., Airbyte is open-source while Fivetran is a SaaS solution. From this great distinction naturally follows different strenght points for the two solutions. In the next, we will go through some of them more in details.
Sources and Destination Connectors
Both solutions provide a large variety of connectors and support the most populars. This comes with some relevant differences. While Fivetran was born in 2012, Airbyte appeared in the market only in the 2020. As a consequence despite the connectors offer is quite similar, those of Fivetran are well tested, robust and self-managed. Instead, Airbyte has been able to have such a large choice thanks to its community. Indeed, Airbyte connectors can be distinguished in two broad categories:
- certified connectors are checked and mantained by the Airbyte team. So they are comparable to those of Fivetran in terms of reliabilty and support.
- community connectors (the great majority) are developed and mantained by the community waiting to become certified. Airbyte itself warns to be caution with using these connectors in production.
If on one hand choosing Airbyte means less customer support than Fivetran, on the oher implies more flexibility and customization. Indeed, Airbyte gives three different ways to build a connector (https://airbyte.com/product/connector-development-kit):
- a no-code connector builder, in less than 10 minutes
- a low-code Connector Development Kit (CDK), in less than 30 minutes
- several other language-specific CDKs, in about 3 hours.
Security
When it comes to security Fivetran has some additional features over Airbyte. Even though extra security layers can be added on top of Airbyte by the user. Concerning security certification:
- Fivetran complies with HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, ISO27001.
- Airbyte complies with SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR.
Additionally, Fivetran provides features such as, Column blocking, Column hashing and AWS PrivateLink.
Pricing
Fivetran provide a volume-based pricing through Monthly Active Rows (MAR) with 14-day free trial. Specifically, pricing is used-base and several plans are available depending on the organization requirements.
For Airbyte 3 different way of use are available: Self-Managed Community, Self-Managed Enterprise and Airbyte Cloud. The Self-Managed solution is free to use and rely only on the Airbyte community. Instead, the other versiona are pay per use, a nice tool to estimate costs with the cloud solution can be found here.
Conclusion
In the rapidly evolving world of data management, Fivetran and Airbyte stand out as two powerful tools for integrating and analyzing data. Fivetran offers a streamlined, commercial SaaS solution, while Airbyte is an open-source platform with a focus on flexibility and customization. Each platform has its strengths, catering to different needs and priorities in the data-driven era.
