Airbyte vs. Pipelinewise

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 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. 

Pipelinewise

Pipelinewise supports 21 connectors, and only adds new ones based on the needs of the mother company, Transferwise.

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. 

Pipelinewise

Singer doesn’t provide any 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. 

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. 

Pipelinewise

Being open source means you can leverage Pipelinewise’s connectors 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.

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. 

Pipelinewise

Pipelinewise doesn’t have any community, and doesn’t provide any support. It has open-sourced documentation.

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.

Pipelinewise

N/A.

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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 Pipelinewise

PipelineWise is an open-source project by Transferwise that was built with the primary goal of serving their own needs. There is no business model attached to the project, and no apparent interest in growing the community.