Airbyte vs. SAP Data Intelligence

Data is often available in diversified locations across different platforms. Integrating this data into a single repository fosters the generation of actionable insights to enhance business performance. It can also permit you to eliminate data silos, enabling the access of data from different teams and improving communication within your organization.

However, creating custom solutions to integrate data from disparate sources can be cumbersome. To overcome this challenge, there are multiple tools that you can use to facilitate effective data integration. Among the popular tools are Airbyte and SAP Data Intelligence.

This guide will outline the key differences between Airbyte vs SAP Data Intelligence and which one you should prefer based on your business needs.

Airbyte: An Overview

Airbyte is a no-code data integration tool that enables you to move data from various sources to the destination of your preference. Offering more than 550 connectors, it lets you migrate structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data between numerous data stores.

If the connector you seek is unavailable, Airbyte provides you with multiple connector development options, including:

• A Connector Builder with an AI assistant.
• A Low Connector Development Kit (CDK).
• Multiple language-specific connector development kits.

Key Features of Airbyte

• AI-Powered Connector Builder: The AI-assist within Connector Builder reads through your connector’s API documentation and auto-fills most configuration fields. This feature simplifies your connector development journey, saving time and effort.‍
• Change Data Capture (CDC): Airbyte offers CDC functionality, which lets you identify incremental changes made to the source data and replicate them in the destination system. This aids you to keep track of updates and maintain data consistency.‍
• Vector Database Support: Airbyte supports prominent vector databases, including Pinecone, Milvus, and Qdrant. By storing vector embeddings in these databases, you can streamline the outcomes of LLM-generated content.‍
• Automated Generation of Vector Embedding: With automatic chunking and embedding, Airbyte allows you to convert raw data into vector embeddings. These embeddings encourage you to build and train powerful AI applications.‍
• Data Pipeline Orchestration: You can integrate Airbyte with numerous data orchestrators, including Airflow, Dagster, and Kestra, to schedule, manage, and control the data flow in your data pipelines.‍
• Enterprise Edition: Airbyte’s Enterprise Edition allows you to work with large-scale data in your preferred virtual private cloud (VPC). With features like multitenancy, role-based access control, personally identifiable information (PII) masking, and enterprise support with SLAs, this version offers robust control and security.

SAP Data Intelligence: An Overview

SAP Data Intelligence is a data management solution that facilitates data integration and orchestration within your organization. It empowers you to consolidate data from distributed locations into a centralized repository for enhanced analytics. Along with the integration feature, SAP also allows you to orchestrate data pipelines and apply business regulations.

Key Features of SAP Data Intelligence

• Predefined Data Systems: With SAP Data Intelligence, you can connect with 49 different data source systems, like AWS S3, as well as 28 data target systems, such as Google BigQuery and SAP NetWeaver.‍
• Advanced Data Transformations: It provides ready-to-use transformations for cleaning, standardizing, and enriching data in an analysis-ready format.‍
• Data Catalog: With SAP Data Intelligence, you can create a centralized business glossary with customizable rules and data ratings to ensure data consistency. This will aid you in gaining a deeper insight into data lineage and auditing, enabling you to track data flows.‍
• Machine Learning Integration: Train, version, and deploy ML models with SAP Data Intelligence in a production environment. This lets you streamline operations while tracking performance.‍
• Third-Party Software Integration: You can connect and work with various applications, including streaming platforms, databases, Hadoop/HDFS, and other third-party systems. This is achieved using standard, third-party, and cloud connectors, providing flexibility for diverse enterprise requirements.‍
• Workflow Automation: Automation and scheduling of repetitive tasks enables you to save effort and time in managing different processes associated with your workflow. By utilizing SAP Data Intelligence automation features, you can focus on more analytical tasks rather than manually executing operations every time.

Airbyte vs SAP Data Intelligence: Tabular Comparison

Here’s a table demonstrating the key differences between SAP Data Intelligence vs Airbyte:

Airbyte vs SAP Data Intelligence: Comprehensive Comparison

Let’s now look at the comprehensive comparison between Airbyte vs SAP Data Intelligence to further understand the key differentiating aspects.

Architecture

Airbyte consists of two parts: platform and connectors. The platform provides the services required to execute data integration operations. The key components of the Airbyte platform are the user interface, configuration API, job scheduling, and logging. The connectors in Airbyte architecture are separate modules that retrieve/store data from/to sources and destinations.

In the above diagram:

• WebApp/UI is an easy-to-use graphical interface through which you can interact with the Airbyte server.‍
• Config API Server is Airbyte’s main controller that coordinates every operation, including creating sources, destinations, and connections.
• Database Config & Jobs stores the past configurations and job history.‍
• Temporal service handles the scheduling and sequencing of tasks within a workflow.‍
• Airbyte Workers read from the task queues and perform the connection operations by making calls to the workload API.
• The Workload API Server represents an HTTP interface to enqueue workloads.‍
• Launcher initiates the workloads by consuming events from the workload APIs and interfaces with Kubernetes.

On the other hand, the architecture of SAP Data Intelligence consists of four different components. The core components of this tool include data integration, streaming, orchestration, and governance.

In the above diagram:

• The integration component enables you to create connections between different applications, whether SAP or third-party systems.
• The streaming component enables the configuration of messaging systems with stream processing services. It uses Kafka Producer and Consumer operators to orchestrate the data flow.
• SAP Data Intelligence’s orchestration component allows you to streamline data processing across distributed environments. It provides centralized data monitoring, offering visibility into all the sources and pipelines.
• For data governance, SAP Data Intelligence provides a Metadata Explorer for discovering and profiling data. This assists you in identifying potential anomalies and recurring business rules necessary to ensure the delivery of high-quality data.

Data Integration Capabilities

Airbyte is a robust data integration solution that allows you to develop ELT and ETL pipelines. In addition to the intuitive UI, it offers several options—PyAirbyte, API, Terraform Provider—to build custom data pipelines.

The Airbyte UI simplifies the pipeline development process for non-tech users, while PyAirbyte—a Python library—facilitates working with Airbyte connectors in a developer environment. With this library, you can extract data from multiple sources and load it in popular SQL caches like DuckDB, Snowflake, and Postgres. These caches are compatible with Python libraries like Pandas and AI frameworks like LangChain.

If you wish to interact with Airbyte using another programming language, use Airbyte API. For more information, follow the official Airbyte API documentation. The Terraform Provider option lets you manage Airbyte resources using Terraform—an Infrastructure as Code solution.

In contrast, SAP Data Intelligence comprises data management capabilities, which include data integration, streaming, orchestration, and governance. With this tool, you get multiple features that encourage you to handle data throughout its life cycle. However, its integration capability is limited because it offers less number of data connectors than Airbyte.

Simplifying GenAI Workflows

With Airbyte, you can convert raw, unstructured data into vector embeddings and store them in supported vector databases. These embeddings are compatible with AI applications and enable you to train and build robust chat applications.

Compared to Airbyte, SAP Data Intelligence offers limited support for GenAI workflows. Although it grants features to develop machine learning models, the lack of support for vector databases makes it challenging to build AI applications.

Pricing

In addition to the Open-source version, Airbyte has multiple pricing options, including Cloud, Team, and Enterprise. The Open Source version is free to use and is usually for data practitioners without the need for governance. The Cloud and Team editions are cloud-hosted, eliminating infrastructure management from your end. The Enterprise edition is for large-scale organizations that prioritize data security and control.

The Cloud version has a volume-based or row-based pricing plan. On the other hand, Teams and Enterprise editions have a capacity-based pricing model. In this plan, the cost depends on data workers, which represent the processing power required for running data pipelines, not on the volume of data moved.

SAP Data Intelligence, in hindsight, doesn’t provide pricing information upfront, but you can contact the SAP sales team for details.

Which One Should You Choose?

Selecting any one data integration solution between Airbyte and SAP Data Intelligence depends on your organization’s specific requirements and scale.

If your primary need is to centralize data into a specific location, irrespective of the size of your data, Airbyte would be a preferable choice. It offers high scalability and an extensive library of data connectors that allow you to replicate data stored in different environments effortlessly.

Alternatively, if you wish to centralize data and execute orchestration operations, SAP Data Intelligence might be suitable. This solution is also a desirable option when your workflow heavily relies on the SAP ecosystem and products.