About the services
About Fivetran
Fivetran is a closed-source, managed ELT service that was created in 2012. As of September 2021, they have built 150 data connectors and have over 2,000 customers. They are considered a reliable choice and have a large customer base. Fivetran charges on monthly active rows (in other words, the number of rows that have been edited or added in a given month).
About Matillion
Matillion is a self-hosted ETL solution, created in 2011. It supports about 100 connectors and provides all extract, load and transform features. Matillion is used by 450 companies in 40 countries. Being self-hosted means that Matillion ensures your data doesn’t leave your infrastructure. You might have to pay for several Matillion instances if you’re multi-cloud.
Focus
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Data ingestion, ELT.
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Data ingestion, data transformation, and business intelligence.
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Sources
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More than 150.
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More than 100.
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Destinations
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All major data warehouses, lakes and databases.
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All major data warehouses, lakes and databases.
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Customizability of connectors
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Limited through Fivetran’s Cloud functions.
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No.
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Database replication
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Full table and incremental via change data capture.
Pricing is indexed on rows.
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Full table and incremental via SELECT/replication key, timestamp or change data capture for AWS-hosted Matillion ETL instances.
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Integration with data stack
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Supports dbt transformations.
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No.
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Support SLAs
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Available
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Available
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Security certifications
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HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2
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GDPR
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Vendor lock-in
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Annual contracts.
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Annual contracts. Self-hosting implies a higher lock-in.
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Purchase process
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Requires conversations with sales.
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Sales only.
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Pricing
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Volume-based pricing with MARs (monthly active rows). Credits are not rolled over.
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Based on the number of Virtual Core Hours used.
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API
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Available through Powered by Fivetran.
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No.
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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.
Fivetran
Fivetran offers connectors for more than 150 data sources. It supports the major data warehouses and databases as destinations. However, Fivetran doesn’t support any data lakes.
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.
Matillion
Matillion integrates with about 100 data sources. Customers can request Matillion to build a new data source, but no one outside the company can build new data sources or make improvements to existing sources.
Matillion only supports Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery, Azure Synapse Analytics and Delta Lake as destinations.
Transformation
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.
Matillion
Matillion offers post-load transformations through what it calls Transformation Components. Users can create Transformation Components via point-and-click selection or by writing them in SQL.
Matillion does not support external transformation tools, such as dbt.
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.
Fivetran
Fivetran released cloud functions to let their customers edit connectors by writing small function to fetch data using Go, Java, Node.js, Python, C# or F#. Customers will need to host their functions on a serverless platform.
Matillion
Matillion 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.
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 any training services.
Matillion
Matillion provides support through an online ticketing system accessible through a support portal or via email.
Documentation relies on articles accessible through the support portal.
Matillion does not have any Slack or Discourse community to provide help.
The company doesn't provide training services, but tutorial videos can be found on YouTube.
Pricing
Fivetran
Fivetran provides a 14-day free trial. It discloses a pricing based on monthly active rows, i.e., rows that are added or edited in a given month.
Fivetran’s volume-based pricing doesn’t adapt well with database replication use cases that involve the replication of millions of rows.
Matillion
Matillion offers a 14-day free trial. Its pricing depends on the cloud platform on which the customer's data warehouse runs.
The pricing model is based on Virtual Core Hours, which will depend on the instance size customers run. Annual billing plans are available with discounts.
