About AWS Glue
AWS Glue is Amazon's serverless ETL service for data integration. Glue provides managed services but is primarily optimized for AWS-centric architectures with limited flexibility outside AWS.
Airbyte vs AWS Glue
Airbyte and AWS Glue are two data integration / ETL platforms. Compare supported data sources and destinations, features, pricing, and more. Understand their differences along with key pros and cons.
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About Airbyte
Airbyte is the open standard in data movement, and can be deployed self-hosted, cloud, or hybrid. Airbyte is used by 18% of the F500 and has over 25,000 community members.
Airbyte vs. AWS Glue: Feature Comparison
Limitations of Using AWS Glue
AWS Lock-in
AWS Glue operates exclusively within the AWS ecosystem, creating complete platform dependency that limits architectural flexibility. Organizations cannot deploy Glue on-premise, in other cloud providers, or in hybrid configurations, forcing all data processing through AWS infrastructure. While Glue integrates seamlessly with AWS services, it struggles with non-AWS resources, often requiring complex networking configurations or data movement into AWS before processing.
This lock-in extends to pricing and contract negotiations, as organizations lose leverage when their entire data infrastructure depends on a single cloud provider. Companies with multi-cloud strategies or those seeking to avoid vendor lock-in find Glue's AWS-only nature a significant constraint.
Limited Connectors
With only 70+ native connectors, AWS Glue has one of the smallest connector libraries among enterprise ETL platforms. The connector gap is particularly pronounced for non-AWS services, SaaS applications, and specialized data sources. While Glue can connect to standard databases and AWS services easily, organizations with diverse data sources often find critical connectors missing.
Creating custom connectors requires writing Python or Scala code, eliminating the low-code benefits and requiring specialized expertise. This limited connectivity forces teams to build and maintain custom integrations or implement complex workarounds for data sources that other platforms support natively.
Complex Pricing
AWS Glue's DPU-hour pricing model creates significant complexity in cost prediction and budget management. Organizations must estimate data processing units, job duration, crawler runtime, and development endpoint usage to forecast costs. Charges accumulate from multiple sources including the data catalog, ETL jobs, development endpoints, and interactive sessions, making it difficult to understand the true cost of data integration.
Development and testing activities can generate unexpected costs, as can failed jobs that consume DPUs without producing value. Many teams report that Glue's actual costs exceed initial estimates by significant margins, forcing them to optimize for cost rather than performance or functionality.
Benefits of using Airbyte
Control your data
Airbyte gives you complete control over your data infrastructure with flexible deployment options that adapt to your security and compliance requirements. Whether you need to keep sensitive data on-premise for sovereignty requirements, leverage cloud scalability, or implement a hybrid approach, Airbyte's single codebase architecture ensures consistent functionality across all deployment models. This flexibility helps organizations meet strict compliance standards like GDPR and HIPAA while maintaining full ownership of their data pipeline infrastructure.
Build without limits
With over 600 pre-built connectors and an AI-powered connector builder, Airbyte removes the traditional barriers to data integration. The platform's extensive connector library covers everything from modern SaaS applications to legacy databases and unstructured data sources. When you need a custom connector, the no-code Connector Builder and low-code CDK enable rapid development in hours instead of weeks. This is amplified by a vibrant community of over 1000 contributors who continuously expand the ecosystem, ensuring you're never blocked by connector availability.
Scale with confidence
Airbyte's predictable capacity-based pricing model means you can scale your data operations without worrying about surprise bills or budget overruns. Unlike consumption-based models that penalize growth, Airbyte's transparent pricing grows predictably with your infrastructure needs. Combined with enterprise-grade reliability featuring 99.9% uptime SLAs and the freedom to choose between deployment options, organizations can confidently scale their data operations without vendor lock-in concerns.
FAQs
1. What are the main differences between Airbyte and AWS Glue?
Airbyte is an open-source ELT platform that emphasizes connector extensibility and community-driven development. AWS Glue, on the other hand, is a fully managed ETL service built to work natively within the AWS ecosystem. While Glue automates a lot of AWS-based orchestration, Airbyte offers flexibility across multiple clouds and environments.
2. Which is better for multi-cloud data integration?
Airbyte was designed for multi-cloud and hybrid setups, supporting destinations like Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and more across any cloud provider. AWS Glue is best suited for teams deeply invested in AWS services such as S3, Athena, and Redshift, but lacks the portability Airbyte provides.
3. Does Airbyte require coding like AWS Glue?
Airbyte provides a low-code interface and an open API for pipeline configuration, making it easy for both engineers and analysts. In contrast, AWS Glue typically requires developers to write or modify PySpark scripts, which introduces a steeper learning curve and longer development time.
4. How do the costs compare between Airbyte and Glue?
Airbyte Open Source is free to self-host, allowing teams to run it on their own infrastructure with full control over scaling and resource costs. For those who prefer a managed experience, Airbyte Cloud offers capacity-based pricing, where customers purchase a set amount of compute capacity (credits per hour) based on their workload requirements. This model provides predictable and transparent pricing, making it easier to manage costs as data volumes grow or fluctuate.
AWS Glue, by comparison, uses a pay-as-you-go model based on Data Processing Units (DPUs) and the duration of job execution. While it eliminates infrastructure management, the cost can rise quickly for long-running or frequent ETL jobs, especially in high-volume environments. Glue’s pricing is convenient for AWS-native workloads but can become unpredictable at scale, particularly when job tuning or retry cycles are required.
5. Who should choose Airbyte over AWS Glue?
Airbyte is ideal for teams that want control, flexibility, and scalability without being tied to a single cloud provider. It’s particularly well-suited for:
- Modern data teams working across multi-cloud or hybrid environments.
- Organizations that prioritize open-source transparency and the ability to customize or extend connectors.
- Companies looking for an end-to-end solution that covers both ELT and reverse ETL workflows enabling not only data ingestion but also data activation across tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Slack.
- Teams that value cost predictability and the option to self-host or use a managed cloud offering.
AWS Glue, on the other hand, is the right fit for AWS-native organizations
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