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 Stitch
Stitch is a cloud-based platform for ETL — extract, transform, and load. More than 3,000 companies use Stitch to move data records every day from SaaS applications and databases into data warehouses and data lakes, where it can be analyzed with business intelligence tools. Stitch is a Talend company and is part of the Talend Data Fabric.
Focus
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Data ingestion, ELT.
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Data ingestion, ELT.
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Sources
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More than 150.
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More than 130.
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Destinations
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All main warehouses 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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Stitch’s Import AI enables their users to push data from anywhere to their destination.
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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 change data capture.
Pricing is indexed on rows.
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Integration with data stack
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Supports dbt transformations.
Airbyte will soon integrate with Prefect, Dagster, Great Expectations, and more. Integrations can be contributed by the community.
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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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HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2
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Vendor lock-in
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Annual contracts.
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Annual contracts. Can leverage Singer’s open-source connectors when used (but connectors are of low quality).
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Purchase process
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Requires conversations with sales.
Open-source edition deployable in minutes.
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Self-service or sales.
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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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Volume-based pricing with new added or edited rows.
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API
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Available through Powered by Fivetran.
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Available.
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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.
Stitch
Stitch supports more than 100 database and SaaS integrations as data sources, and the major data warehouse and data lake destinations.
Customers can contract with Stitch to have them build new sources for them, and anyone can add a new source to Stitch using Singer, their open-source toolkit for writing scripts that move data.
Singer integrations can be run on Stitch to take advantage of their monitoring, scheduling and credential management features. However, most Singer integrations are now deprecating in quality. So you never know the quality of a tap or target until you have actually used it.
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.
Stitch
Stitch, among other stitch alternatives, as an ELT tool, specializes in executing transformations necessary for ensuring compatibility with the destination platform. These transformations primarily involve tasks like translating data types and denesting data when applicable. However, beyond these essential functions, Stitch does not offer any additional transformation features.
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.
Stitch
Stitch’s customers can leverage Singer to build custom Singer connectors that they can plug on their Stitch account. However, of the approximately 200 Singer connectors Stitch can leverage to adapt to their needs, most are low quality, as only the top connectors are maintained actively by the Singer community.
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.
Stitch
Stitch provides in-app chat support to all their customers, and phone support is available for Enterprise customers.
Their documentation is comprehensive and is open source — anyone can contribute to it.
Stitch does not provide training services.
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.
Stitch
Stitch provides a 14-day free trial. It discloses a pricing based on rows synced.
Stitch’s volume-based pricing doesn’t adapt well with database replication use cases that involve the replication of millions of rows.
Standard plans range from $100 to $1,250 per month depending on scale, with discounts for paying annually.
