Attributes |
Airbyte |
Singer |
Focus |
Data movement (including AI support), governance. |
Data ingestion, ELT. |
Sources |
550+ pre-built customizable connectors for both structured and unstructured sources. |
About 150-200 after 5 years, but mostly deprecating in quality. |
Destinations |
Data warehouses, lakes, databases, and prominent vector databases. |
Singer supports some data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake, PostgreSQL). |
Customizability of connectors |
Edit any connectors and build new ones within minutes through Airbyte’s Connector Builder (low-code, no-code, AI-powered). |
Users 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. |
Database replication |
Full table and incremental via change data capture. Pricing adapted for this use case. |
No |
Pricing |
Volume-based pricing for Cloud and capacity-based pricing for Enterprise and Team versions. |
N/A |
Integration with data stack |
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. |
Singer integrates with various tools through community contributions (e.g., Meltano integration), though not as extensively as Airbyte. |
Support SLAs |
Available |
No |
Security certifications |
SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR |
No |
Vendor lock-in |
Airbyte Core (ELv2) and Connectors (MIT) are open source. |
Singer is AGPL. |
Purchase process |
Self-service or sales for Airbyte Cloud. Open-source edition deployable in minutes. |
N/A |
API |
Available through Airbyte Cloud and Airbyte’s open-source edition. |
Singer's architecture inherently uses APIs through taps (sources) that connect to web APIs. |
Github Followers |
701 Followers |
421 Followers |
Performance & Scalability |
Modular architecture designed for scalability with support for parallel processing of large datasets and distributed deployment capabilities. |
Lightweight framework without built-in distributed processing; scalability requires manual configuration and additional engineering effort. |
Ease of Use & User Interface |
Provides an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), built-in scheduling/monitoring/logging features, low-code/no-code connector builder for rapid setup without extensive technical expertise. |
Primarily CLI-based approach requiring technical expertise; lacks graphical user interface or built-in scheduling features; setup relies heavily on command-line operations. |
1. 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
Airbyte’s approach to its connectors is unique in three ways:
1. Airbyte is the only platform supporting structured and unstructured sources and vector database destinations for your AI use cases.
2. Airbyte offers Airbyte-official connectors on which it provides an SLA, and a marketplace of connectors powered by the community and built from Airbyte’s Connector Builder (low-code, no-code, or AI-powered). Marketplace connectors have quality and usage indicators. This approach enables Airbyte to offer the largest and fastest-growing catalog of more than 550 connectors.
3. All Airbyte connectors are open-sourced, giving users the ability to edit them at will. However, all connectors built with the Connector Builder can be customized. Adding a new stream only takes minutes, as does building a new connector from scratch.
This open approach empowers Airbyte users to address the growing list of custom connectors they need, while those same users would have to build connectors in-house with a closed-source solution.
Airbyte will also start offering reverse-ETL connectors in 2025.
Singer
Talend (acquirer of StitchData) seems to have stopped investing in maintaining Singer’s community and connectors. As most connectors see schema changes several times a year, more and more Singer’s taps and targets are not actively maintained and are becoming outdated.
On Singer, each connector is its own open-source project. So you never know the quality of a tap or target until you have actually used it. There is no guarantee whatsoever about what you’ll get.
Finally, Singer’s connectors are standalone binaries: you still need to build everything around to make them work (e.g., UI, configuration validation, state management, normalization, schema migration, monitoring, etc.).
2. Transformation
Airbyte
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. To help with this, Airbyte open-sourced a few dbt models to have analytics-ready data at your destination.
Airbyte also supports RAG-specific transformations, including chunking powered by LangChain and embeddings enabled by OpenAI, Cohere, and other providers. This allows you to load, transform, and store data in a single operation.
Finally, Airbyte is offering some mapping features, enabling its users to perform column selection or hashing, handle PII, filtering, and more.
Singer
Singer doesn’t provide any transformation features.
3. 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, Dagster’s, Prefect’s, or Kestra’s orchestrator to trigger Airbyte’s ELT jobs.
- leverage Langchain or LlamaIndex for all your AI-related jobs.
- deploy Airbyte in self-hosted, cloud-hosted, or hybrid.
It also means you can edit any pre-built connectors to your own specific needs or even leverage the no-code / low-code / AI-powered Connector Builder to build your own custom connectors in minutes (instead of days) and share their maintenance with the community and the Airbyte team.
Airbyte’s promise is to address all your data movement needs.
Singer
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.
4. 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 Cloud provides in-app support with an average response time of less than 1 hour.
Its documentation is comprehensive and complete with engaging tutorials and quickstarts. Airbyte also has a Slack, GitHub, and Discourse community where help is available from the Airbyte team, other users, or contributors.
Airbyte does not yet provide training services, but it offers its Airbyte Cloud and Enterprise customers a premium support option with SLAs.
Singer
Singer has a dying Slack community, and doesn’t provide any support. It has open-sourced documentation.
5. Pricing
Airbyte
Airbyte provides a 14-day free trial. After the trial, prices are available depending on the volume of data you wish to replicate. The cost associated with the Enterprise and Team editions depends on two factors—the number of connections (data sources) and data sync frequency.
Airbyte doesn’t charge for failed syncs or normalization.
Airbyte offers adapted pricing to customers with large data volumes.
Singer
Singer’s premium service is Stitch. Please refer to the Airbyte vs. Stitch article for more details.
Conclusion
Airbyte and Singer both offer valuable solutions for data integration, each with distinct approaches and features. Airbyte provides a unified platform with extensive connector support and a user-friendly interface, making it accessible for teams seeking streamlined data integration without extensive coding. Its centralized repository and flexibility in connector development languages further enhance its appeal. Conversely, Singer's modular design offers high customization, allowing users to build and share their own connectors, which is advantageous for teams with specific requirements and the technical expertise to manage custom infrastructure. Ultimately, the choice between Airbyte and Singer should align with your organization's technical capabilities, customization needs, and resource availability to ensure an effective and efficient data integration strategy.
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