Fivetran and Informatica sit at opposite ends of data integration. Fivetran is a managed ELT service, now merged with dbt Labs, that bills on Monthly Active Rows per connection. Informatica is an enterprise data management suite, owned by Salesforce since November 2025, whose on-prem PowerCenter lost standard support on March 31, 2026. If a PowerCenter migration is forcing the choice, Airbyte is a third option: open source, published pricing, and on-prem or cloud deployment.
| Fivetran | Informatica (IDMC / PowerCenter) |
|---|
| Ownership | Fivetran + dbt Labs (merged June 2026) | Salesforce (since November 2025) |
| Core focus | Managed ELT ingestion, now bundled with dbt transformation | Enterprise suite: integration, MDM, data quality, catalog, governance |
| Connectors | 700+ | Broad enterprise connectivity; count varies by product and license |
| Custom connectors | Connector SDK (Python, customer-maintained), Functions; "By Request" with a 2–8 week initial review | Built within IDMC or PowerCenter; typically specialist work |
| Pricing model | Monthly Active Rows, billed per connection | Informatica Processing Units (IPUs), consumption-based |
| Published pricing | Free up to 500K MAR; Standard from ~$500 per million MAR | No: quote-only |
| Minimums | $5/month per standard connection (1–1M MAR); $12,000 annual contract minimum | Annual IPU commitments set in the contract |
| Deployment | Managed cloud; Hybrid Deployment on Enterprise and Business Critical | IDMC cloud; PowerCenter on-prem (standard support ended March 31, 2026) |
| Transformation | dbt, part of the same company since June 2026 | Visual mapping designer in IDMC and PowerCenter |
| Time to first pipeline | Minutes, self-serve | Typically weeks, often with professional services |
| Security and compliance | SOC 1, SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA BAA, PCI DSS Level 1, HITRUST | SOC 1, SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA BAA |
| Open source | No | No |
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.
Informatica is a long-standing enterprise data management vendor, founded in 1993. Its products include PowerCenter, the on-prem ETL tool, and Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), which covers integration, master data management, data quality and cataloging. Salesforce completed its roughly $8 billion acquisition on November 18, 2025, and now markets it as Informatica from Salesforce, alongside MuleSoft.
The PowerCenter deadline
Standard support for PowerCenter 10.5 ended on March 31, 2026, and 10.5.10 was the last planned release. Paid extended support runs through March 2027, with narrower sustaining support after that. Informatica's preferred path is migrating to IDMC, which still means re-platforming onto a new consumption meter.
That makes this comparison less about Fivetran vs PowerCenter and more about where PowerCenter workloads go next: IDMC, a managed ELT service like Fivetran, or an open platform.
Pricing: rows per connection vs. quote-only IPUs
Both vendors price on consumption, but only Fivetran publishes a rate.
Fivetran bills on Monthly Active Rows, and three rule changes in two years have pushed bills up:
- March 2025: MAR moved from account-level to per-connection billing, removing account-wide volume discounts.
- January 2026: Deletes and history-mode changes now count toward paid MAR.
- January 2026: Every standard connection moving 1 to 1M MAR carries a $5 monthly minimum.
Informatica bills IDMC in Informatica Processing Units, with no public per-IPU rate or tier price. Costs depend on which services consume IPUs and how much, so budgets are hard to forecast as workloads grow. PowerCenter customers moving to IDMC are often offered migration discounts, but those typically apply only to the first years of the contract.
In short, Fivetran's bill tracks row churn across connections. Informatica's tracks a negotiated IPU commitment you can't price before a sales cycle.
Connectors and ease of use
Fivetran lists 700+ connectors and is self-serve: pick a source and destination, and the first sync runs in minutes. When a source is missing, you file a "By Request" ticket with a 2–8 week initial review, or build one with the Connector SDK.
Informatica offers broad enterprise connectivity, including mainframe, ERP and legacy database sources that SaaS-first tools often skip. That breadth comes with complexity: teams often need certified specialists or professional services to build and change pipelines.
Fivetran loads raw data and leaves transformation to dbt, which became part of the same company in June 2026. That's convenient if you want one vendor, but dbt is no longer a neutral layer.
Informatica transforms data in its own visual mapping designer, before or after loading. PowerCenter mappings don't carry over to other tools, so every mapping has to be rebuilt or converted when you leave.
Deployment and data residency
Fivetran is managed cloud first. Its Hybrid Deployment, where data is processed in your environment, is limited to Enterprise and Business Critical plans and a subset of connectors.
Informatica's on-prem option is PowerCenter, which is past standard support. IDMC is cloud-hosted, with regional pods such as a Switzerland region added in March 2026. Neither vendor offers a supported, fully on-prem path for new workloads today.
What the Salesforce acquisition means
Salesforce's stated goal is to make Informatica the data foundation for its own AI and CRM products. If your stack centers on Snowflake, Databricks or BigQuery, ask three questions at renewal:
- Roadmap: Will investment favor Salesforce-centric use cases?
- Pricing: Will renewals be bundled into Salesforce's commercial model?
- Overlap: How will Informatica and MuleSoft integration products converge?
Fivetran's dbt merger raises a similar question from the other side: ingestion and transformation now come from one vendor.
Where each one leads
Fivetran leads on connector breadth for SaaS sources, fast self-serve setup, and compliance attestations, including PCI DSS Level 1 and HITRUST on its Business Critical plan.
Informatica leads on everything beyond data movement: master data management, data quality and enterprise cataloging. If those modules anchor your governance program, weigh them separately from ingestion.
| Your situation | Better fit |
|---|
| You need SaaS sources synced fast with minimal setup and a fully managed service | Fivetran |
| You require PCI DSS Level 1 or HITRUST attestation in a managed ELT service | Fivetran |
| You rely on Informatica MDM and data quality and are standardizing on Salesforce | Informatica |
| You need deep mainframe or legacy ERP connectivity inside one governed suite | Informatica |
| You're migrating off PowerCenter and need to stay on-prem or in your VPC | Airbyte (Enterprise Flex) |
| You want a price you can see before a sales cycle | Airbyte |
| Your bill is driven by high-churn tables, deletes or many small connections | Airbyte (capacity-based) |
| You want ingestion independent of both Salesforce and dbt | Airbyte |
Where Airbyte fits
Fivetran trades control for convenience, and Informatica trades simplicity for breadth. Airbyte is the open option for teams that want neither trade-off in their data movement layer.
- A home for PowerCenter workloads. Airbyte runs self-hosted, managed cloud, hybrid, or fully on-prem with Enterprise Flex, all on one codebase. Workloads that can't go to public SaaS have somewhere to land.
- Prices you can see. Core is free to self-host, Standard starts at $20/month and Plus at $189/month. Pro and Enterprise Flex price on Data Workers, dedicated compute capacity, so volume growth doesn't raise the bill.
- 700+ connectors, plus a fast path for the rest. The Connector Builder generates a connector from API docs with AI assist, and the low-code and Python CDKs cover anything custom.
- Independent and destination-neutral. Airbyte treats every warehouse, lakehouse and database as a first-class destination, and integrates with dbt, Airflow, Dagster and Prefect for transformation and orchestration.
Related comparisons: Airbyte vs Fivetran, Airbyte vs Informatica, Fivetran vs Matillion, Matillion vs Informatica.
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