Forrester TEI Identifies 239% ROI for Airbyte Users

Forrester TEI study finds Airbyte users achieved 239% ROI, highlighting cost savings, productivity gains, and faster data pipeline development.

DATA

June 9, 2026

Kushal Chatterjee

Summarize with AI:

Every company wants to show real, measured value for their customers. That’s why we asked Forrester to evaluate the Airbyte Data Replication Engine. The resulting Total Economic Impact (TEI) report is out, and the findings are excellent for our users: 239% return on investment, $1.1M in net present value, and less than six months to pay for the system.

ROI is a number that is often too easy to print in a blog. What follows is a look at how Forrester arrived at these numbers and what the study entailed.

How the study was built

Forrester interviewed five individuals from four organizations using Airbyte. These organizations represent a range of industries, from entertainment to healthcare. The companies interviewed were combined into a composite organization: a $2B company with 5,000 employees, with 50 Airbyte users using Airbyte Pro in the cloud. The value estimations were performed with a 10% discount rate, and Forrester retains editorial control of the report, with the interviewed customers of Airbyte separately surveyed.

Prior to Airbyte, each organization used various data integration tools and methods, including a mix of custom scripting and legacy ETL solutions. The process of setting up and maintaining those tools took a significant portion of the engineers' time in each organization. In one company, for example, a single individual was responsible for providing data to the remainder of the organization. Furthermore, there were quality and accuracy issues associated with the information that was reported from these systems.

Where the value came from

The analysis performed by Forrester indicated three main benefits of Airbyte that realized a total value of $1.6M in present value over a three-year period.

Data engineer productivity was increased by $723,000. Airbyte allows engineers to build and maintain data integration pipelines with code templates specific to each data source. Forrester calculated a 60% reduction in the time it took to build these data pipelines, as well as a 40% reduction in the time to maintain them. In one organization, an engineer was able to create what used to take a month of coding effort in two days. Another reduced the time to build a data pipeline from five days to three hours.

Infrastructure management labor was saved by $371,000. Forrester calculates that moving away from managing their own data infrastructure and relying on the managed platform freed up the time of one full engineer. An engineer interviewed by Forrester said that without Airbyte, his organization was unable to complete other projects due to data infrastructure maintenance with their old system.

Airbyte led to incremental profit growth of $462,000, with a 12% operating margin for the organizations. Additionally, there were non-financial benefits: for one company, there were no data-related questions for the first time in years during the holiday season. For another, they were able to onboard 20% more customers each year.

The benefits Forrester didn't put a number on

There were several other benefits that, while not easily quantified, were mentioned by the individuals interviewed from the companies that use Airbyte:

Teams moved from having to perform certain data-related jobs every day to having to perform them every 10 minutes.
Data quality was significantly improved.
Various business teams began to use Airbyte's UI to perform their data tasks instead of having to ask engineers for those tasks.
Time to insight for various departments of the companies was improved from two or three days to one day.

The bottom line

For any company operating today, the ability to effectively move data from place to place is a foundational tool. Without it, no analytics or AI workflows on top will succeed. The value that Airbyte delivers to its customers is absolutely critical.

Read the full study here. We’re ecstatic about this third-party validation of what we have always felt to be true about Airbyte for data replication.

About the Author

Kushal Chatterjee

Kushal is Senior Product Marketing Manager at Airbyte

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