Airbyte vs. Matillion

Features

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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.

Airbyte

Within 5 years of its inception, Airbyte already offers connectors for more than 550 data connectors, including all major data warehouses, lakes, and databases.

All Airbyte connectors are open-sourced and can be edited to address any custom needs the customers have. Airbyte users can leverage these connectors through the open-source edition or the Cloud offer. 

Airbyte’s no-code Connector Builder also enables their users to build custom connectors in a standardized way within 10 minutes (instead of 2 days), and the Airbyte team and community can help in their maintenance. 

More than 50% of the connectors have been contributed by the growing community. Airbyte will provide a SLA for the certified connectors, but Airbyte’s ambition is also to provide a SLA for other connectors through the community and its participative model on the long tail of connectors, and to reach 1,000+ connectors in the next few years. 

Airbyte will offer reverse-ETL connectors in 2024. 

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

Airbyte

Airbyte is an ELT tool, and does not transform data prior to loading. 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. 

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. 

Airbyte

Airbyte’s architecture modularity implies that you can leverage any part of Airbyte. For instance, you can use Airflow’s orchestrator to trigger Airbyte’s ELT jobs. 

You can also edit any pre-built connectors to your own specific needs, or even leverage the Connector Development Kit to build your own custom connectors in a matter of hours (instead of days) and have its maintenance shared with the community and the Airbyte team. 

Airbyte’s promise is to address all your ELT needs and the long tail of integrations. 

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.

Airbyte

Airbyte provides chat support directly on their web app, with an average time to respond of 5 minutes. 

Their documentation is comprehensive and full of tutorials. 

Airbyte also has a Slack and Discourse community where help is available from the Airbyte team, other users or contributors.

Airbyte 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

Airbyte

Airbyte Cloud provides a 14-day free trial. After the trial, the pricing depends on the volume of data replicated. The pricing of Enterprise and Team versions is capacity-based, where pricing depends on the number of Airbyte connections and data refresh frequency.

Airbyte doesn’t charge for failed syncs or normalization. 

Airbyte offers adapted pricing to customers with large data volumes.

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.

About the services

About Airbyte

Airbyte is the leading open data movement platform, created in July 2020. Airbyte offers more than 550 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 Matillion

Matillion is a self-hosted ETL solution, created in 2011. It supports over 550 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.