About Boomi
Pentaho (now part of Hitachi Vantara) offers ETL through Pentaho Data Integration (PDI/Kettle) plus analytics and reporting. Pentaho faces challenges with modern cloud architectures and limited ongoing development.
Airbyte vs Boomi
Airbyte and Boomi 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. Boomi: Feature Comparison
Limitations of Using Boomi
High Costs
Boomi's per-connection pricing model becomes prohibitively expensive as organizations scale their integration needs. Each additional connection, whether for a new data source, destination, or application, adds to the monthly bill, creating a direct penalty for comprehensive data integration.
Organizations frequently report that achieving enterprise-wide integration with Boomi costs several times their initial budget projections. The pricing structure discourages experimentation and innovation, as teams hesitate to add new connections due to cost implications. Many companies find themselves limiting their integration scope or seeking alternatives for high-volume connections to control costs.
iPaaS Focus
While Boomi excels at application integration, its iPaaS-centric design makes it less suitable for pure data integration and ETL use cases. The platform prioritizes real-time API integration and application workflows over batch data processing and transformation.
This application focus means Boomi lacks many features essential for data engineering, such as sophisticated transformation capabilities, data quality management, and warehouse optimization. Organizations with primarily data integration needs find themselves paying for iPaaS features they don't use while missing critical ETL functionality.
Deployment and Vendor Lock-in
Boomi's proprietary platform creates significant vendor lock-in with no option for self-hosting or bringing your own infrastructure. All integrations must run through Boomi's cloud infrastructure, raising concerns about data sovereignty and security for sensitive information.
The proprietary nature of Boomi's integration definitions and mappings makes it extremely difficult to migrate to another platform without completely rebuilding integrations. Organizations lose flexibility in their architecture choices and become dependent on Boomi's roadmap, pricing decisions, and platform availability. This lock-in becomes particularly problematic when organizations need to adapt to changing requirements or adopt best-of-breed solutions.
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. How does Airbyte’s open-source model benefit enterprise data teams compared to Boomi?
Airbyte’s open-source foundation gives data teams full control and transparency over their pipelines from source code to deployment environment. Unlike traditional iPaaS tools that operate as closed, fully managed platforms, Airbyte allows teams to self-host, customize connectors, and integrate directly into their existing data stack.
This openness translates into faster innovation, lower total cost of ownership, and better compliance alignment, since data processing can occur within the organization’s own infrastructure. For enterprises with strict security or data sovereignty requirements, this approach ensures flexibility without vendor lock-in or opaque architecture.
2. Does Boomi offer the same open-source flexibility as Airbyte?
No. Boomi is a closed, proprietary platform, while Airbyte is fully open-source, enabling teams to modify, self-host, or even build their own connectors with the Airbyte CDK.
3. Which is more cost-effective for large data volumes - Airbyte or Boomi?
Airbyte typically has lower total cost of ownership for data ingestion, since it uses open-source infrastructure or predictable per-credit billing in the Cloud version. Boomi licensing can become costly for data-heavy workloads or complex API integrations.
4. Why do data teams choose Airbyte over Boomi for modern data integration needs?
While Boomi is a strong platform for application integration and workflow automation, it’s not purpose-built for large-scale data ingestion or analytics workloads. Airbyte, on the other hand, focuses on data movement and ELT pipelines, enabling teams to efficiently extract and load massive volumes of data from diverse sources into modern warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks.
Airbyte’s open-source architecture and hybrid deployment flexibility give data teams full control over their data pipelines ideal for organizations with data sovereignty, compliance, or customization needs. In contrast, Boomi’s closed iPaaS model prioritizes ease of use for business integrations, making it less suited for the complex, high-volume data workflows demanded by today’s analytics and AI ecosystems.
5. When should a team choose Airbyte over Boomi?
Teams should choose Airbyte when their priority is scalable, transparent data ingestion for analytics and AI. Airbyte is built for modern ELT pipelines moving raw data efficiently into warehouses and lakes with full control, customization, and hybrid deployment options. While Boomi focuses on application and workflow integrations, Airbyte is the better choice for data teams that need flexibility, open-source transparency, and AI-ready pipelines.
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