From a business standpoint, data is the most valuable resource for formulating powerful strategies and making data-backed decisions. The data can be generated from various platforms like CRM, ERP, and social media platforms. However, bringing all these data into a central system is the most important task to avoid any data silos. You must employ a robust platform that fulfills your business needs for effective integration. Fivetran and Informatica are two widespread platforms in demand for their immense capabilities.
In this article, you will gain a comprehensive overview of Fivetran vs Informatica platforms, comparing their features, functionalities, and capabilities.
Fivetran Overview
Fivetran is a cloud-based data integration platform developed in 2012. It allows you to perform different integration processes, such as ELT, data movement, transformation, and governance. With its easy-to-use interface, you can seamlessly connect your different sources and destinations. This helps you decide on an integration strategy that fits your business requirements.
Some of the unique features of Fivetran
Fivetran offers a wide range of deployment options, such as self-hosted, hybrid, and cloud-based, to accommodate different preferences in data integration.
With Fivetran, you can save your IT resources for other projects as it facilitates data democratization. This feature lets you share data across your organization without compromising data security and compliance.
Informatica Overview
Informatica is a well-known data integration and management platform that allows you to move your data efficiently. You can effortlessly extract, transform, and load data from various sources into a data warehouse. It provides useful products like PowerCenter and Intelligent Cloud Data Management to migrate and handle your data workflows.
Unique features of Informatica
Informatica is also tailored to suit both on-premise and cloud environments, facilitating a seamless data integration process.
It is equipped with AI capabilities to automate your data management tasks. The CLAIRE AI feature of Informatica lets you classify and organize data automatically by identifying data types and similar columns. This automated data classification helps to streamline multiple processes, thus allowing you to perform better analytics.
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CLAIRE AI model for data management tasks, scanning metadata, and automating data classification.
Purchase Process
You can use the free trial plan for low data movement or contact their sales for custom pricing.
You can try its free plan to fulfill basic data integration needs or contact its sales team to learn more about the consumption-based pricing model.
Fivetran vs Informatica: The Ultimate Showdown
Here is the comprehensive comparison between Fivetran and Informatica:
Fivetran vs Informatica: Connectors
Informatica has a library of 100+ pre-built connectors, providing access to cloud applications, flat files, and databases. These connectors can be used to build data pipelines seamlessly within a few minutes. Additionally, if you are unable to find a connector of your choice, you can use its SDK to build a custom connector or request a new one by contacting its sales team.
Comparatively, Fivetran hosts a rich library of 500+ connectors. It supports all the major databases, such as DynamoDB and MySQL, as well as data warehouses like Databricks, Redshift, BigQuery, and Snowflake. These connectors allow you to extract data from the source and effortlessly load it into your preferred location. In addition, it also provides a Function connector, which you can use to create a custom data connector as an extension of Fivetran. This enables you to extract data from a specific source not supported by Fivetran and manage your data pipelines.
Fivetran vs Informatica: Transformation
With Fivetran transformations, you can organize, analyze, and visualize information while maintaining analytical flexibility and data quality. It mainly allows you to perform transformations with dbt Core and Quick Start Data Models. Both models ease intricate modifications using simple SQL statements. You can leverage dbt to orchestrate the cleaning, testing, transformation, and modeling of datasets. But if you don’t want to create a dbt project, you can employ pre-built data models available in Quick Start Data Models to transform your data.
Compared to Fivetran, Informatica provides a wide range of transformation capabilities to meet both simple and complex data processing needs. For example, there are two ways to apply a transformation based on the number of rows in a dataset—Active and Passive.
Using an active transformation allows you to modify the number of rows passing through the transformation. One example of this is Filter transformation, which helps eliminate the rows that don't fit the filter parameters. Passive transformation, on the other hand, preserves the number of rows in the input before or after the transformation. An example of a passive transformation is Expression transformation, which offers low-level calculation capabilities without altering the number of rows in a collection.
Overall, if you require a broader range of built-in transformation capabilities and less scripting dependence with the ability to handle complex manipulations, Informatica could be a good fit.
Fivetran vs Informatica: Data Replication
In Informatica, replication tasks enable you to identify and copy data from the source to the destination. When configuring a task, you have the option to replicate all rows of a source object each time the task runs. In addition, you can also perform incremental sync to replicate only the rows that have changed since the last execution via CDC. Informatica also provides a log-based CDC feature to store all the changes in a transaction log for data recovery purposes. You can also leverage this feature to read new database transactions like insert, update, and delete from source databases.
Comparatively, Fivetran offers efficient and real-time data replication tailored to various business workloads using multiple data replication methods. You can utilize the log-based CDC feature to quickly identify changes in your source data and replicate them into the required destination via a simple setup. Alternatively, if you want to perform log-free replication, Fivetran supports this with teleport sync. It enables you to capture changes in the source and replicate incremental data changes into the target system without any additional setup other than a read-only SQL connection.
Fivetran vs Informatica: Security and Compliance
When it comes to securing data, Informatica offers robust security features such as encryption, access controls, user authentication, and audit trails. These measures allow your data to be transmitted successfully without any loss. Apart from these features, Informatica follows industry practices and certifications like FedRAMP, HIPAA, SOC1, SOC2, and SOC3 to develop customer confidence.
On the flip side, Fivetran is committed to providing administrative, physical, and technical security to ensure data integrity and confidentiality. Its security features include automated column blocking and hashing, user permission, SSH tunnels, and data encryption. While column blocking enables you to restrict certain columns from being replicated in your target system, hashing provides security for your Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Beyond these security measures, it also follows standard industry practices and certifications like ISO 27001, HIPAA BAA, PCI DSS Level 1, SOC1, and SOC2.
Fivetran vs Informatica: Pricing
With Informatica's consumption-based pricing approach, you only pay for the volume of data you consume. To gauge the capacity of your integration requirements in advance, the Informatica Processing Unit (IPU) can be utilized. In addition, Informatica has a free version that you can use to perform low-volume data movements.
In contrast, Fivetran allows you to pay for the services you use with its customizable subscription options. You can use its free plan if you are working with a small amount of data. However, if you work with big datasets, you can upgrade to its paid versions—Starter, Standard, and Enterprise. Each plan is tailored to meet various requirements based on the amount of data, the number of connectors, and the security features.
Airbyte, the Best Alternative to Fivetran And Informatica
Data integration and management are essential for making informed decisions, and the above-mentioned platforms are competent in providing these solutions. However, Airbyte is a leading data integration platform that uses a modern ELT approach to migrate data from various sources to destinations. Using its extensive library of 350+ pre-built connectors, you can seamlessly collect data from databases, SaaS applications, and flat files and build a data pipeline within minutes. Beyond integration capabilities, Airbyte also provides a CDC feature to effortlessly capture data from source files and replicate it into the target system.
In addition to the above-mentioned features, Airbyte also has a vibrant community of 15000+ contributors. Being an open-source platform, it enables you to collaborate with others to explore different technologies, share articles and resources, and discuss best practices for data integration requirements. If you face any queries during data ingestion, you can ask for help by reaching out to the community.
Some of the outstanding features of Airbyte
Data Security: Airbyte hosts several advanced security features to ensure data safety. These measures include access control, audit logging, encryption, regular security assessments, and authentication mechanisms to maintain data integrity and confidentiality.
Developer-Friendly UI: PyAirbyte simplifies the process of using Airbyte by providing a Python-based interface for managing and designing data integration pipelines. This feature is well-suited for Python programmers, as it empowers them to connect and extract data from sources supported by Airbyte within minutes.
Data Pipeline Monitoring: With Airbyte, you can leverage various options to monitor ELT pipelines. One of the options includes integration with Datadog, which enables you to analyze and monitor your data pipelines directly with Datadog’s dashboard without incurring extra costs.
Flexible Deployment: Airbyte offers self-hosted and cloud-based deployment models to fulfill your data integration needs. You can use these models interchangeably to suit your specific requirements.
Conclusion
In this article, you have learned about the key features and major differences of Fivetran vs Informatica. Each platform has unique features as compared to other and can be used depending on your organizational needs. While Fivetran can be an ideal choice for data movement and transformation, Informatica is more appropriate for data integration and management.
However, if you want to benefit from efficient data integration with a modern ELT approach, consider signing up for Airbyte’s platform.
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Chief Data Officer
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Head of Data Analytics
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Data Engineer & Cloud Architect
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"Airbyte does a lot of things really well. We just had to set it up, and it ran from there. Even moving 40GB worth of data works just fine without needing to worry about sizing up.”
