Fivetran, AWS Glue and Airbyte all get data into your warehouse or lake, but they work in very different ways. Fivetran is a managed ELT service, now merged with dbt Labs, that bills on Monthly Active Rows. AWS Glue is Amazon's serverless Spark service, billed per DPU-hour and built around AWS. Airbyte is an open-source data movement platform with 700+ connectors, published pricing, and deployment on any cloud or on-prem.
Fivetran vs AWS Glue vs Airbyte at a glance
| Fivetran | AWS Glue | Airbyte |
|---|
| Category | Managed ELT, bundled with dbt | Serverless Spark ETL and data catalog | Open data movement (ELT and CDC) |
| Prebuilt connectors | 700+ | AWS-native sources, JDBC, plus selected SaaS and AWS Marketplace connectors | 700+, including SaaS APIs, databases, files and unstructured sources |
| Building a pipeline | Configure in UI | Write or generate PySpark or Scala jobs, or use Glue Studio | Configure in UI, API, Terraform or PyAirbyte |
| Custom sources | Connector SDK (Python); "By Request" with a 2–8 week initial review | Custom Spark code or custom connectors | No-code Connector Builder with AI assist, low-code and Python CDKs |
| Pricing model | Monthly Active Rows, billed per connection | $0.308 per DPU-hour on Glue 6.0, $0.44 on 5.1 and earlier (us-east-1) | Volume-based (Standard, Plus) or capacity-based Data Workers (Pro, Enterprise Flex) |
| Entry price | Free up to 500K MAR; $12,000 annual minimum on contracts | Pay as you go; no free DPU-hours for jobs or crawlers | Free (Core); $20/month (Standard) |
| Destinations | Warehouses, lakes, databases on any cloud | Primarily AWS (S3, Redshift, SageMaker Lakehouse) | Any warehouse, lakehouse, database or vector store, on any cloud |
| Deployment | Managed cloud; Hybrid on Enterprise and Business Critical | AWS-managed only | Self-hosted, managed cloud, hybrid or fully on-prem |
| Who uses it | Analysts and engineers | Data engineers with Spark skills | Analysts (UI) and engineers (API, Terraform, PyAirbyte) |
| Open source | No | No | Yes |
About Fivetran
Fivetran is a managed ELT service founded in 2012. It grew through acquisitions: HVR and Teleport Data in 2021, then Census and Tobiko Data in 2025. On June 1, 2026 it completed an all-stock merger with dbt Labs, and the combined company operates as Fivetran + dbt Labs.
About AWS Glue
AWS Glue is Amazon's serverless data integration service. It runs Apache Spark, Python shell and Ray jobs, catalogs data with crawlers and the Glue Data Catalog, and offers zero-ETL integrations into S3, Redshift and SageMaker Lakehouse. Glue 6.0 shipped in August 2026 with a newer Spark runtime, Apache Iceberg v3 support and 30% lower DPU rates.
About Airbyte
Airbyte is the open standard for data movement, used by 18% of the Fortune 500. It replicates data from 700+ sources into warehouses, lakehouses, databases and AI context stores, and runs self-hosted, fully managed, or hybrid inside your own boundary.
Fivetran and Airbyte are built to get data out of sources: they ship connectors with authentication, pagination, incremental syncs and schema changes already handled.
Glue is built to process data with Spark. For ingestion from SaaS apps and APIs, that means writing or generating jobs that handle all of that logic yourself, and every source becomes code to maintain. Glue's strengths are large-scale transformation and cataloging inside AWS.
Pricing: rows, compute time or capacity
Each tool meters something different, so the same workload can cost very different amounts.
Fivetran bills on Monthly Active Rows, counted per connection since March 2025. Since January 2026, deletes and history-mode changes count toward paid MAR, and every standard connection moving 1 to 1M MAR carries a $5 monthly minimum. Contracts carry a $12,000 annual minimum.
AWS Glue bills per DPU-hour, per second with a one-minute minimum. In us-east-1, Spark jobs cost $0.308 per DPU-hour on Glue 6.0 and $0.44 on Glue 5.1 and earlier. Crawlers, interactive sessions and data quality add DPU time, streaming jobs bill continuously, and zero-ETL application ingestion adds $1.50 per GB. Cost depends heavily on how well each job is sized and tuned.
Airbyte publishes its prices. Core is free to self-host. Cloud starts at $20/month (Standard) and $189/month (Plus). Pro and Enterprise Flex price on Data Workers, dedicated compute capacity, so cost doesn't depend on row counts or job tuning.
Connectors
Fivetran and Airbyte each list 700+ connectors covering SaaS apps, databases and files.
Glue's native connectors center on AWS services (S3, RDS, DynamoDB, Redshift, Kinesis) and JDBC databases, plus a set of SaaS and AWS Marketplace connectors. For other sources, you write Spark code.
When a source is missing, Fivetran offers a "By Request" queue or a Python SDK you maintain. Airbyte's Connector Builder generates a connector from API docs with AI assist.
Fivetran leaves transformation to dbt, which merged into Fivetran in June 2026.
Glue is a transformation engine: it runs Spark at scale over S3 data lakes, and its Data Catalog is the default metastore for Athena, EMR and Redshift Spectrum.
Airbyte focuses on data movement and integrates with dbt, Airflow, Dagster and Prefect. Many AWS teams use Airbyte to land data and Glue or dbt to transform it.
Deployment and multi-cloud
Fivetran is managed cloud first, with Hybrid Deployment on Enterprise and Business Critical plans. It loads to destinations on any cloud.
Glue runs only in AWS and is designed around AWS destinations.
Airbyte runs four ways on one codebase: free self-hosted Core, managed cloud, hybrid, or fully on-prem with Enterprise Flex. It writes to Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, S3, Iceberg and more, and can run inside your own AWS account.
When to choose Fivetran, AWS Glue or Airbyte
| Your situation | Better fit |
|---|
| You want a fully managed service and are happy to standardize on dbt from the same vendor | Fivetran |
| You require PCI DSS Level 1 or HITRUST attestation in a managed ELT service | Fivetran |
| You run heavy Spark transformations on an S3 data lake | AWS Glue |
| You need a data catalog for Athena, EMR and Redshift Spectrum | AWS Glue |
| You need SaaS and API data without writing Spark ingestion code | Airbyte |
| You load into non-AWS destinations, or several clouds | Airbyte |
| You want cost that doesn't depend on row counts or job tuning | Airbyte (capacity-based) |
| You need to self-host, run in your own AWS account, or go fully on-prem | Airbyte |
Using them together
These tools aren't mutually exclusive. A common AWS pattern is Airbyte to ingest SaaS and database data into S3, Redshift or Iceberg tables, and Glue or dbt to transform it downstream. Teams moving off Fivetran often keep Glue for transformation and swap only the ingestion layer.
Related comparisons: Airbyte vs AWS Glue, Airbyte vs Fivetran, AWS Glue vs Airflow vs Airbyte, Fivetran vs Talend vs Airbyte.
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