About the services
About Airbyte
Airbyte is the leading open-source ELT tool, created in July 2020. Airbyte has more than 200 data connectors, and have 25,000 companies using them to sync data, syncing more than 1,000B rows per month. Their ambition is to commoditize data integration by addressing the long tail of connectors through their growing contributor community. Airbyte released a Cloud offer in April 2022 with a new pricing model distinguishing database from APIs and files.
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.
Features
Focus
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ELT as a first step.
Reverse-ETL coming in 2023.
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Data ingestion, data transformation, and business intelligence.
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Sources
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More than 200.
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More than 100.
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Destinations
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All 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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User can edit any pre-built connectors and build new ones within 2 hours with Airbyte’s Connector Development Kit.
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No.
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Database replication
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Full table and incremental via change data capture.
Pricing adapted for this use case.
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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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Integrate deeply with Kubernetes, Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, and dbt.
Airbyte will soon integrate with 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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SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR
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GDPR
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Vendor lock-in
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Airbyte Core and Connectors are open source.
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Annual contracts. Self-hosting implies a higher lock-in.
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Purchase process
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Self-service or sales for Airbyte Cloud.
Open-source edition deployable in minutes.
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Sales only.
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Pricing
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Free Connector Program for alpha and beta connectors. Volume-based pricing differentiating APIs from databases. Credits are 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 Airbyte Cloud and Airbyte’s open-source edition.
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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.
Airbyte
Within 2 years from inception, Airbyte already offers connectors for more than 200 data sources, and all major data warehouses, lakes and databases as data destinations.
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 low-code Connector Development Kit also enables their users to build custom connectors in a standardized way within 30 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 2023.
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 provides a 14-day free trial or $1,000 worth of credits, whichever expires first. Airbyte’s pricing is credit-based, and you consume credits based on volume with a different price for APIs, databases and files, which enables it to adapt well to all use cases, including database replication.
Airbyte doesn’t charge for failed syncs or normalization.
Airbyte offers adapted pricing to customers with large volumes.
Finally, Airbyte offers a Free Connector program that makes all their alpha and beta connectors free on Airbyte Cloud.
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.
