Airbyte vs. Hevo Data

About the services

About Airbyte

Airbyte is the leading open data movement platform, created in July 2020. Airbyte offers more than 350 data connectors in its marketplace, with over 7,000 companies using it to sync data daily. In an AI world with an ever-growing list of data sources, Airbyte positions itself as the only futureproof solution. It offers extensibility through Connector Builder and a marketplace, supports unstructured sources and vector database destinations, and allows both self-hosted and cloud-hosted options.

About Hevo Data

Hevo Data is a closed-source, managed ETL service that was created in 2017. As of September 2021, they have built 110 data connectors and have hundreds of customers. Hevo Data offers real-time replication to their destinations.

Features

Feature Comparison: Airbyte vs. Hevo Data

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Connectors

Pre-built connectors are the primary way to differentiate ETL / ELT solutions, as they enable data teams to focus only on the insights to build.

Airbyte

Airbyte’s approach to its connectors is unique in three ways: 

1. Airbyte is the only platform supporting structured and unstructured sources and vector database destinations for your AI use cases.

2. Airbyte offers Airbyte-official connectors on which it provides an SLA, and a marketplace of connectors powered by the community and built from Airbyte’s Connector Builder (low-code, no-code, or AI-powered). Marketplace connectors have quality and usage indicators. This approach enables Airbyte to offer the largest and fastest-growing catalog of connectors for sources (300+) and destinations (50+).

3. All Airbyte connectors are open-sourced, giving users the ability to edit them at will. However, all connectors built with the Connector Builder can be customized. Adding a new stream only takes minutes, as does building a new connector from scratch. 

This open approach empowers Airbyte users to address the growing list of custom connectors they need, while those same users would have to build connectors in-house with a closed-source solution. 

Airbyte will also start offering reverse-ETL connectors in 2025.

Hevo Data

Hevo offers many connectivity options, comprising over 150 connectors, including 11 destination options and 140+ sources. The source connectors include popular databases such as (MongoDB, MySQL, and MariaDB), Saas applications, streaming services, and cloud storage. Additionally, if you can’t find the required built-in connector, you can request their teams to develop a custom connector.

Transformation

Airbyte

Airbyte offers two options to get your data out of the box: a serialized JSON object and the normalized version of the record as tables. Airbyte also offers custom transformations via SQL and through deep integration with dbt, allowing their users and customers to trigger their own dbt packages at the destination level right after the EL. To help with this, Airbyte open-sourced a few dbt models to have analytics-ready data at your destination. 

Airbyte also supports RAG-specific transformations, including chunking powered by LangChain and embeddings enabled by OpenAI, Cohere, and other providers. This allows you to load, transform, and store data in a single operation.

Finally, Airbyte is offering some mapping features, enabling its users to perform column selection or hashing, handle PII, filtering, and more.

Hevo Data

With ETL, Hevo enables you to transform data before loading it to the desired data warehouse and ensures analysis-ready data upon arrival. It allows you to execute the transformation code within the pipeline setup. Hevo supports three types of transformations. They are In-flight transformation, User-driven transformation, and Post-data transformation. The in-flight transformation involves applying little changes such as adding meta fields, converting dates, and configuring access controls. The user-driven transformation involves transforming data before loading it into the destination, it includes data cleaning, filtering, and re-expression. Lastly, the post-data transformation allows further data refinement after loading.

Customizability

Every company has custom data architectures and, therefore, unique data integration needs. A lot of tools don’t enable teams to address those, which results in a lot of investment in building and maintaining additional in-house scripts. 

Airbyte

Airbyte’s architecture modularity implies that you can leverage any part of Airbyte. For instance, you can: 

• use Airflow’s, Dagster’s, Prefect’s, or Kestra’s orchestrator to trigger Airbyte’s ELT jobs. 
• leverage Langchain or LlamaIndex for all your AI-related jobs. 
• deploy Airbyte in self-hosted, cloud-hosted, or hybrid.

It also means you can edit any pre-built connectors to your own specific needs or even leverage the no-code / low-code / AI-powered Connector Builder to build your own custom connectors in minutes (instead of days) and share their maintenance with the community and the Airbyte team. 

Airbyte’s promise is to address all your data movement needs.

Hevo Data

Hevo Data doesn’t provide any customizability, unfortunately. 

Support & docs

Data integration tools can be complex, so customers need to have great support channels. This includes online documentation as well as tutorials, email and chat support. More complicated tools may also offer training services.

Airbyte

Airbyte Cloud provides in-app support with an average response time of less than 1 hour. 

Its documentation is comprehensive and complete with engaging tutorials and quickstarts. Airbyte also has a Slack, GitHb and Discourse community where help is available from the Airbyte team, other users or contributors. 

Airbyte does not yet provide training services, but it offers its Airbyte Cloud and Enterprise customers a premium support option with SLAs. 

Hevo Data

Hevo Data provides in-app chat support. 

Their documentation is comprehensive.

The company doesn't provide training services, but tutorial videos can be found on YouTube.

Pricing

Airbyte

Airbyte Open Source is free to use. 

Airbyte Cloud provides a 14-day free trial (which starts after the 1st sync) or $1,000 worth of credits, whichever expires first. Airbyte’s pricing is credit-based, and you consume credits based on volume with a different price for APIs, databases and files, which enables it to adapt well to all use cases, including database replication. Airbyte Cloud doesn’t charge for failed syncs or normalization. Airbyte offers adapted pricing to customers with volume discounts. Learn more about Airbyte's transparent pricing plans here.

Airbyte Enterprise is offered with a fixed contract, not volume-based.

Hevo Data

Hevo Data operates on an event-based pricing model, where any row update contributes to your billing. They provide three pricing tiers: Free, Starter, and Business.

• Free: For over 50+ connectors, Hevo Data offers up to 1 million monthly events and a free initial data load per source. It includes unlimited users and Single Sign-on (SSO) functionality.
• Starter: Offers a 14-day trial, providing access to 150+ connectors with monthly and yearly subscription options. It offers 5 million events per month.
• Business: It encompasses everything in the starter tier and adds HIPAA compliance and a 6-hour SLA for enhanced service assurance.