All ETL tool comparison

Airbyte vs. Stitch

Airbyte is an open-source data integration / ETL alternative to Stitch. Compare data sources and destinations, features, pricing and more. Understand their differences and pros / cons.

Check the comparison spreadsheet
VS
Airbyte
Airbyte
Stitch
Stitch

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 Stitch

Stitch is a cloud-based platform for ETL — extract, transform, and load. More than 3,000 companies use Stitch to move data records every day from SaaS applications and databases into data warehouses and data lakes, where it can be analyzed with business intelligence tools. Stitch is a Talend company and is part of the Talend Data Fabric.

Features

Focus

ELT as a first step.
Reverse-ETL coming in 2023.

Data ingestion, ELT.

Sources

More than 200, two years from inception.

More than 130.

Destinations

All data warehouses, lakes and databases.

All major data warehouses, lakes and databases.

Customizability of connectors

User can edit any pre-built connectors and build new ones within 2 hours with Airbyte’s Connector Development Kit.

Stitch’s Import AI enables their users to push data from anywhere to their destination. 

Database replication

Full table and incremental via change data capture.

Pricing adapted for this use case.

Full table and incremental via change data capture.

Pricing is indexed on rows. 

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.

No.

Support SLAs

Available

Available

Security certifications

SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR

HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2

Vendor lock-in

Airbyte Core and Connectors are open-source.

Annual contracts. Can leverage Singer’s open-source connectors when used (but connectors are of low quality). 

Purchase process

Self-service or sales for Airbyte Cloud.

Open-source edition deployable in minutes.

Self-service or sales.

Pricing

Free Connector Program for alpha and beta connectors. Volume-based pricing differentiating APIs from databases. Credits are rolled over. 

Volume-based pricing with new added or edited rows. 

API

Available through Airbyte Cloud and Airbyte’s open-source edition. 

Available.

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. 

Stitch

Stitch supports more than 100 database and SaaS integrations as data sources, and the major data warehouse and data lake destinations. 

Customers can contract with Stitch to have them build new sources for them, and anyone can add a new source to Stitch using Singer, their open-source toolkit for writing scripts that move data. 

Singer integrations can be run on Stitch to take advantage of their monitoring, scheduling and credential management features. However, most Singer integrations are now deprecating in quality. So you never know the quality of a tap or target until you have actually used it. 

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 or through deep integration with dbt, allowing their users and customers to trigger their own dbt packages at the destination level right after the EL. 

Stitch

Stitch is also an ELT tool. It only provides the transformations required for compatibility with the destination, such as translating data types or denesting data when relevant. Aside from this, no extra transformation feature is offered. 

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. 

Stitch

Stitch’s customers can leverage Singer to build custom Singer connectors that they can plug on their Stitch account. However, of the approximately 200 Singer connectors Stitch can leverage to adapt to their needs, most are low quality, as only the top connectors are maintained actively by the Singer community.

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 in-app chat support with an average time to respond of 5 minutes. 

Their documentation is comprehensive and full of tutorials. It is also open source, so anyone can contribute to it. 

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. 

Stitch

Stitch provides in-app chat support to all their customers, and phone support is available for Enterprise customers. 

Their documentation is comprehensive and is open source — anyone can contribute to it. 

Stitch does not provide training services.

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.

Stitch

Stitch provides a 14-day free trial. It discloses a pricing based on rows synced. 

Stitch’s volume-based pricing doesn’t adapt well with database replication use cases that involve the replication of millions of rows. 

Standard plans range from $100 to $1,250 per month depending on scale, with discounts for paying annually.

Compare Airbyte's pricing to other ELT tools

1 minute cost estimator

Don't trust our word, trust theirs!

"The cool thing with Airbyte is that there is this neutrality. With Airbyte there’s a push to do things outside of the warehouse. Fivetran and Stitch have a warehouse centric mentality."
Vivek Ayer
Vivek Ayer
Data Infrastructure at Skupos Inc.
"Airbyte is a very promising solution for the single point of data integration. We continuously migrate our connectors from our existing solution to Airbyte as they became available on Airbyte, and look forward to the release of Airbyte Cloud!"
Apostol Tegko
Apostol Tegko
Data Analyst at Fnatic
“I was blown away by how easy it was to get started with Airbyte. We were able to adapt a Singer tap for a missing integration in 25 mins. Because Airbyte is so simple to use, I was able to avoid a planned data engineer hire.​”
Jins Kadwood
Jins Kadwood
CTO at AgriDigital