Airbyte vs. Fivetran

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 Fivetran

Fivetran is a closed-source, managed ELT service created in 2012. It has about 500 data connectors and over 5,000 daily customers. Fivetran has been considered the ELT standard for the previous modern data stack. Fivetran charges on monthly active rows (in other words, the number of rows that have been edited or added in a given month).

Feature Comparison: Airbyte vs. Fivetran

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Key Distinctions Between Airbyte & Fivetran

1. Connectors

Pre-built connectors are the primary way to differentiate ETL / ELT solutions, enabling 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. 

‍Fivetran

Fivetran offers connectors for about 500 data sources. It supports the major data warehouses and databases as destinations.

Customers can pay extra and request that Fivetran build a new data source, but no one outside the Fivetran team can build new data sources or make improvements to existing sources. 

Fivetran’s customers often end up having to build and maintain custom connectors in-house with their own data engineering teams to address all their custom needs.

2. 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. 

‍Fivetran

Fivetran is an ELT tool, and does not transform data prior to loading, either. It offers its own opinionated normalization out of the box, and recently added support for post-load transformations via copy-and-paste SQL and dbt.

3. Customizability

Every company has custom data architectures and custom connector 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.

‍Fivetran

Fivetran released cloud functions to let their customers edit connectors by writing small functions to fetch data using Go, Java, Node.js, Python, C#, or F#. Customers will need to host their functions on a serverless platform. The platform's customizability is limited, and users can’t edit pre-built connectors to their needs.

4. Support & docs

Data integration tools can be complex, so customers need great support channels. These include online documentation, 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. 

‍Fivetran

Fivetran provides support through an in-app form but does not offer chat support.

Their documentation is comprehensive, but Fivetran doesn’t offer a Slack or Discourse community. 

Fivetran does not provide training services but offers premium support options with SLAs to its customers.

5. 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. 

‍Fivetran

Fivetran offers a free tier limited to 500k monthly active rows, i.e., rows that are added or edited in a given month. It also provides a 14-day free trial on any of its paid plans and discloses pricing based on monthly active rows.

Fivetran’s volume-based pricing doesn’t adapt well to database replication use cases that involve the replication of millions of rows.

6. User friendly interface

An intuitive user interface is important for data integration tools, ensuring that users can easily access and manage their data connections and workflows.

Airbyte

Airbyte’s UI is designed to be exceptionally user-friendly, featuring a clean and organized layout that enhances user experience. The dashboard provides a clear and comprehensive overview of connections, making it easy for users to set up new integrations with intuitive, step-by-step guides. Users can monitor their data syncs and see real-time logs directly within the interface, which is a significant advantage for troubleshooting and maintaining data flows.

The interface balances simplicity with advanced features, ensuring that it is accessible for beginners while still offering the depth needed by experienced users. Continuous updates and improvements are made based on user feedback, further enhancing its usability.

Fivetran

Fivetran’s UI is also intuitive and focuses on simplicity and ease of use. The dashboard provides a minimalist design, allowing users to easily set up and manage their data connectors with minimal effort. Fivetran offers a guided setup process that simplifies the initial configuration. However, Fivetran’s interface can sometimes lack the depth and customization options that more advanced users might require.

7. No steep learning curve

The ease with which non-technical users can adopt a data integration tool is an important factor. A tool with a gentle learning curve can significantly reduce onboarding time and improve user satisfaction.

Airbyte

Airbyte is known for its intuitive interface that simplifies the setup process. Users can follow step-by-step guides that clearly outline each stage of setting up data integrations. 

The platform’s design focuses on user-friendliness, making it accessible even to those without extensive technical knowledge.

Minimal technical skills are required to get started with Airbyte. The platform’s comprehensive documentation and abundant tutorials ensure users can quickly become proficient in managing data integrations.

Fivetran

Fivetran’s support options are more limited. Without a Slack or Discourse community, users have fewer platforms to seek help from peers. 

The absence of chat support means users must rely on submitting queries through an in-app form, which can delay resolution times.

While Fivetran is designed to be user-friendly, non-technical users might find it more challenging to navigate without the immediate and extensive support available in Airbyte.

8. Flexibility

Flexibility in deployment options is a key consideration for many users when selecting a data integration tool.

Airbyte

Airbyte offers exceptional flexibility, allowing users to run the platform on their preferred cloud provider or on-premises. This ensures that organizations can tailor the deployment to their specific needs and infrastructure, whether they prefer the scalability of cloud solutions or the control of on-premises setups.

Airbyte’s open-source model also fosters a vibrant community of contributors and users, continually enhancing the platform’s capabilities and ensuring that it evolves to meet diverse user needs.

Fivetran

Fivetran, on the other hand, does not offer the same level of flexibility in deployment options. It is primarily a cloud-based service, which means users must rely on Fivetran’s infrastructure. While this can simplify setup and maintenance for some users, it may not be suitable for organizations with specific on-premises requirements or those who prefer to have more control over their data integration processes.

Benefits of using Airbyte

When comparing Airbyte to Fivetran, several benefits stand out:

• Largest catalog: Airbyte’s marketplace of connectors features the largest and fastest-growing catalog of connectors to help you address all your connector needs, both for structured and unstructured sources. All the low-code pre-built connectors are also customizable at will. 
• Full extensibility: Airbyte’s open data movement platform offers greater flexibility and customization options than Fivetran's proprietary solution. This openness allows users to tailor the platform to their specific needs and cover all their connector needs, while a closed-source solution like Fivetran will force them to build in-house connectors that are brittle and hard to maintain for all the connectors that Fivetran doesn’t support. 
• GenAI readiness: Airbyte supports both structured and unstructured sources and vector database destinations to power your genAI workflows. It also supports RAG-specific transformations, including chunking powered by LangChain and embeddings enabled by OpenAI, Cohere, and other providers, allowing you to load, transform, and store data in a single operation.
• Flexible deployment models: Airbyte can be deployed as cloud-hosted, self-hosted, or hybrid, so you can move your data, even the sensitive ones. This enables Airbyte to be the most Enterprise-ready platform regarding security and control. 
• Community: Airbyte has the most extensive data & AI engineering community around data movement. In addition to contributing connectors in the marketplace, this community shares support, advice, best practices, and more. 
• Cost scalability: Airbyte Cloud is the only plan that is volume-based (volume discounts and unlimited packages are available). Airbyte Open Source is free to use, and Airbyte Enterprise is a fixed contract. This gives customers a lot more visibility compared to Fivetran’s MAR model. 
• Absence of vendor lock-in: Due to its open-source nature, Airbyte Open Source will still be a good backup plan for any of Airbyte's customers. 

The various Airbyte usecases demonstrate its benefits over Fivetran, including its open-source nature, extensibility, genAI readiness, flexible deployment models, and community. These factors make Airbyte an attractive option for businesses looking to address all their current and future data integration needs, especially in an AI-driven world.

Limitations of using Fivetran

When comparing Fivetran to Airbyte, several limitations may arise:

• Proprietary Nature: Fivetran operates as a proprietary platform, limiting users' ability to access and modify the underlying code. Users cannot edit pre-built connectors at will and are limited in how they can build new custom connectors. 
• Higher Costs: Fivetran typically involves higher costs due to licensing fees and MAR-based subscription plans. These expenses may not be suitable for organizations with limited budgets.
• Limited Connector Availability: While Fivetran provides a wide range of pre-built connectors for popular data sources, it may not support all sources or destinations required by users. Organizations with specific integration needs may find themselves limited by the available connectors and may be forced to build in-house connectors that are brittle and hard to maintain. 
• No support for genAI workflows:  Fivetran doesn’t support unstructured sources or vector database destinations. 
• Limited deployment model: Fivetran is cloud-managed. Only HVR (database replication tool acquired by Fivetran) can be self-hosted. 

Less Community Support: Fivetran's absence of community leaves customers alone in addressing their questions and is limited to Fivetran’s support team.

FAQs

1. How do the number and flexibility of connectors compare between Airbyte and Fivetran?
   Airbyte offers connectors for over 300 data sources (both structured and unstructured) and 50 destinations, including major data warehouses, lakes, databases, and vector databases. All Airbyte connectors are open-sourced and customizable. Fivetran provides connectors for approximately 500 data sources (no unstructured ones), primarily supporting major data warehouses, lakes and databases, but does not support vector databases. Airbyte’s catalog of connectors is growing much more quickly than Fivetran’s. Furthermore, Airbyte offers a Connector Builder (low-code, no-code, or AI-powered) to customize marketplace connectors or build new ones from scratch in minutes. Fivetran offers Function to help create connectors, but the extent of customization is limited and it requires hosting on a serverless platform.
2. What are the data transformation capabilities of Airbyte and Fivetran, and how do they differ?
   Both Airbyte and Fivetran operate as ELT tools, meaning they do not transform data prior to loading. Airbyte offers output options like serialized JSON object and normalized records as tables, along with custom transformations via SQL and integration with dbt. Fivetran provides opinionated normalization out of the box and recently added support for post-load transformations via copy-and-paste SQL and dbt. Airbyte also supports RAG-specific transformations, including chunking powered by LangChain and embeddings enabled by OpenAI, Cohere and other providers, allows you to load, transform, and store data in a single operation.
3. Which platform offers more options for customizing integrations to suit unique data architecture needs?
   Airbyte offers high customizability, allowing users to edit pre-built connectors, build custom connectors using the Connector Builder, and integrate with other tools like Airflow / Dagster / Prefect for orchestration. Fivetran offers some customizability through cloud functions, enabling users to edit connectors using various programming languages but requires hosting on a serverless platform.
4. What level of support and documentation is available for users of Airbyte and Fivetran?
   Airbyte provides comprehensive in-app support for their customers with an average response time of less than 1 hour, extensive documentation with tutorials, and active communities on Slack and Discourse. Airbyte Open Source users only have access to the community platforms and support. Fivetran also offers in-app support. Its documentation is comprehensive but lacks a dedicated community platform.
5. How does the pricing structure of Airbyte compare to Fivetran, and which platform offers better value for different use cases?
   Airbyte offers a 14-day free trial or $1,000 worth of credits, credit-based pricing adapted to different use cases, and volume discounts, for its Cloud product. It does not charge for failed syncs or normalization. Airbyte Open Source is free to use, and Airbyte Enterprise is offered through fixed contracts. Fivetran offers a free tier limited to 500,000 monthly active rows and a 14-day free trial for paid plans. Its pricing is based on monthly active rows, which may not adapt well to certain use cases involving the replication of millions of rows.