About the services
About Airbyte
Airbyte is the leading open-source ELT tool, created in July 2020. Airbyte has more than 300 data connectors, and have 40,000 companies using them to sync data, syncing more than 1PB 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 Meltano
Meltano is an open-source orchestrator dedicated to data integration, spined off from Gitlab on top of Singer’s taps and targets. Since 2019, they have been iterating on several approaches. Meltano distinguishes itself with its focus on DataOps and the CLI interface.
Focus
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ELT as a first step.
Reverse-ETL coming in 2023.
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Data ingestion, ELT.
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Sources
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More than 200, two years from inception.
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30 natively. Integrates with all Singer connectors, but provides no maintenance of them.
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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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User can edit any pre-built Singer taps and targets, but there is no standardization, and they need a lot of engineering work to be functional.
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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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No
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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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Integrate deeply with Airflow and dbt.
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Support SLAs
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Available
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No
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Security certifications
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SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR
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No
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Vendor lock-in
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Airbyte Core (ELv2) and Connectors (MIT) are open source.
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Meltano is built on top of Singer, which is open source (AGPL).
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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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N/A
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Pricing
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Volume-based pricing differentiating databases from APIs. Credits are rolled over.
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N/A
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API
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Available through Airbyte Cloud and Airbyte’s open-source edition.
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Teams can leverage their CLI.
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{{COMPARISON_CTA}}
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 3 years from inception, Airbyte already offers connectors for more than 300 data sources, and 50 destinations 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.
Meltano
Within 2 years from inception, the Meltano team built 35 connectors, but then decided to stop investing time in expanding their list of supported connectors, choosing instead to rely fully on Singer’s taps and targets (without providing any support or maintenance for them).
Singer’s connectors are open sourced (AGPL) and can be edited to address custom needs. However, unlike Airbyte’s connectors they don’t work out of the box and require engineering work.
Meltano also offers a SDK to more easily build Singer taps and targets, with more standardization.
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 (both open-source and cloud editions), allowing their users and customers to trigger their own dbt packages at the destination level right after the EL.
Meltano
Meltano only offers transformations through a deep integration with the open-source edition of 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. Airbyte Usecases include using 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.
Meltano
Being open source means you can leverage Singer’s taps and targets the way you want. But the lack of standardization across them makes it a difficult task to leverage those connectors to address your custom needs. Meltano hopes to address the standardization issue for new connectors built with their SDK, though.
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.
Meltano
Meltano has a Slack community, and has open-sourced documentation. Meltano does not provide support apart from that.
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.
Meltano
Meltano doesn’t offer a cloud-hosted solution yet, or any premium support. It only offers an open-source edition.
