As your business moves toward scalability and success, the role of data becomes more important than ever. Data helps you analyze trends, identify patterns, derive insights, and design better solutions for your organization. However, the potential of data can only be leveraged when it is available in an organized format. Being located in multiple applications such as sales, marketing, and finance, the integration and management of data become crucial. This is where you can employ popular platforms such as Fivetran, AWS Glue, and Airbyte to streamline your data workflow and make it analytics-ready.
In this article, you will understand the key features and differences between Fivetran vs AWS Glue vs Airbyte.
Fivetran Overview
Launched in 2012, Fivetran is a cloud-based platform facilitating seamless data integration, transformation, and governance. Its rich connector library allows you to quickly connect your data sources and destinations. With Fivetran, you can also build pipelines programmatically using REST APIs, thus offering more control over managing your data pipelines. To fulfill various integration needs, it offers a wide range of deployment options, such as hybrid, self-hosted, and cloud-based.
Unique Features of Fivetran
With Fivetran, you can perform log-based CDC, which empowers you to detect and capture any source data changes and replicate them in the destination.
Fivetran facilitates data democratization by enabling you to share data across the organization without risking data privacy.
AWS Glue Overview
AWS Glue is a serverless and fully managed data integration platform that was launched in 2017. It utilizes an ETL approach to effortlessly collect data from multiple sources, transform it, and load it into a centralized system. This platform provides various integration and management capabilities, such as data discovery, cleaning, transformation, and centralized cataloging.
Unique Features of AWS Glue
You can create the ETL process in AWS Glue using a drag-and-drop job editor, and it will automatically generate the code to collect, transform, and load the data.
Using the AWS Glue Data Quality feature, you can improve the quality of your datasets. To facilitate this, it automatically generates statistics, suggests quality standards, and monitors data pipelines. In addition, you also get notified when data quality declines, which makes it simpler to spot inaccurate, obsolete, or missing data before it affects your dataset.
Airbyte Overview
Introduced in 2020, Airbyte is a robust data integration and replication platform. It uses a modern ELT approach to effortlessly extract data from diverse sources like databases, SaaS applications, or flat files and load them into a centralized repository. Apart from integration, you can also perform data replication using its CDC capability. This feature allows you to identify incremental changes to your source data and copy them into the target system, thus facilitating data consistency.
Unique Features of Airbyte
With Airbyte, you can leverage its open-source Python library, PyAirbyte. This library is suitable if you have good Python programming skills, as it enables you to quickly extract data from various sources through connectors supported by Airbyte.
Airbyte offers various data monitoring features for data replication workflows, such as connection logging for each connector. For advanced monitoring requirements, you can leverage Airbyte’s integration with Datadog. This allows you to track and analyze your pipelines within Datadog’s dashboard without any additional cost.
Airbyte has a large community of 15000+ members who engage with and maintain its open-source platform. You can also connect with other data practitioners on Slack to get assistance with connection issues, discuss best data integration practices, or share resources and articles for reading purposes.
Convinced? Move to Airbyte and build seamless data pipelines hassle-free
Fivetran vs AWS Glue vs Airbyte: Major Comparisons
Connectors
With over 500+ connectors, Fivetran offers an extensive library. You can readily extract data from sources like MySQL or DynamoDB and load them into data warehouses such as Databricks, Redshift, and BigQuery. In addition, it has a Function connector that you can utilize to build a custom connector as an extension for Fivetran. This lets you manage your data pipelines and collect data from specific sources that Fivetran does not provide.
AWS Glue offers built-in support for some frequently used sources such as Aurora, Redshift, MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL by utilizing JDBC connections. In addition, you can employ custom JDBC drivers to perform extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs. However, if you are working with data sources that are not natively supported by AWS Glue, such as SaaS applications, you can use connectors. It allows you to connect over 70 data sources, enabling you to manage data efficiently across various platforms. These connectors eliminate the need for manual driver development.
In contrast, Airbyte has a rich library of more than 350 pre-built connectors that automate data pipeline creation without writing a single line of code. You can employ these connectors to easily manage your integration process as they facilitate seamless data extraction and loading. If you are unable to find a connector of your choice in its list, you can always create custom connectors using its Connector Development Kit. This allows you to build a customized connector within ten minutes using its low/no-code environment. You can also request a new connector by contacting Airbyte’s sales team.
Data Transformation
With its dbt Core and Quick Start Data Model, Fivetran empowers you to perform data transformations. These features allow complex data modifications using simple SQL queries. Integration with dbt enables you to test, clean, and transform datasets. But if you don't want to create a dbt project, you can employ the Quick Start Data Model. This model lets you execute transformations by utilizing pre-built data models.
You can employ the AWS Glue drag-and-drop editor to define your ETL workflows. Based on this, Glue will automatically generate code for extracting, transforming, and loading jobs, allowing you to perform seamless data movement. This code is generated in Python or Scala and written for Apache Spark. For advanced transformations, you can write Python code and leverage the PySpark library.
In contrast, Airbyte enables you to integrate with dbt to facilitate data transformation. With the help of dbt, you can do simple to complex transformations to clean and enhance raw data to make it analytics-ready.
Security and Certifications
Fivetran is dedicated to ensuring data integrity and privacy by offering administrative, physical, and technical security measures. It offers several features like data encryption, login authorization, SSH tunnels, and automatic column blocking and hashing to protect data from external threats. You can prevent specific columns or tables from being replicated in your target system by using column blocking and leverage hashing to protect your Personally Identifiable Information (PII). In addition to these precautions, it complies with ISO 27001, HIPAA BAA, PCI DSS Level 1, SOC1, and SOC2 certifications.
On the other hand, using industry-standard encryption methods, AWS Glue encrypts your data both in transit and at rest. Additionally, it gives you fine-grained access control over your metadata and complies with several security certifications, including SOC 2 and HIPAA.
In contrast, Airbyte provides a range of security measures to protect your data from vulnerabilities and unauthorized access. Some of these features include technical logs, access restriction, credential management, encryption in transit, audit logging, and authentication mechanisms. Airbyte follows the best industry standards and is compliant with SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and GDPR.
Pricing
Fivetran's flexible subscription plans let you pay for the services you use. If you are dealing with small data volumes, you can utilize its 14-day free trial. However, if you are working with large datasets, you should opt for its paid versions—Starter, Standard, and Enterprise.
On the flip side, the pricing of AWS Glue is determined by how many Data Processing Units (DPUs), a measure of processing speed and memory capacity, you utilize per hour. You pay for data discovery and performing ETL jobs at an hourly cost, billed by the second.
Conversely, Airbyte offers a Self-Managed version that is open-source and accessible to everyone. In addition to the free version, you can choose its paid versions—Airbyte Cloud and Powered by Airbyte. Both of these plans can be employed according to your business needs. You can also try out its 14-day free trial if you have minimal data integration needs.
Final Word
This article comprehensively covers three different platforms—Fivetran, AWS Glue, and Airbyte, detailing their key features. It vividly explains their main differences and how each platform is designed to suit different data integration needs. While Fivetran simplifies data integration with its automated cloud-native approach, AWS Glue is a suitable service for AWS ecosystem users.
We recommend using Airbyte, a reliable and scalable platform. It follows a modern ELT approach, provides an open-source version, and offers several options for designing data pipelines. Sign in on the platform today and uncover its unique features.
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Extensibility to cover all your organization’s needs
Airbyte has become our single point of data integration. We continuously migrate our connectors from our existing solutions to Airbyte as they became available, and extensibly leverage their connector builder on Airbyte Cloud.
Airbyte helped us accelerate our progress by years, compared to our competitors. We don’t need to worry about connectors and focus on creating value for our users instead of building infrastructure. That’s priceless. The time and energy saved allows us to disrupt and grow faster.
We chose Airbyte for its ease of use, its pricing scalability and its absence of vendor lock-in. Having a lean team makes them our top criteria. The value of being able to scale and execute at a high level by maximizing resources is immense
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