Airbyte vs. Stitch

About Airbyte

Airbyte is the leading open data movement platform, created in July 2020. Airbyte offers more than 350 data connectors in its marketplace, with over 7,000 companies using it to sync data daily. In an AI world with an ever-growing list of data sources, Airbyte positions itself as the only futureproof solution. It offers extensibility through Connector Builder and a marketplace, supports unstructured sources and vector database destinations, and allows both self-hosted and cloud-hosted options.

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.

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Feature Comparison: Airbyte vs. Stitch

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Key Distinctions Between Airbyte & Stitch

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 connectors for sources (300+) and destinations (50+).

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.

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. 
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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 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. 

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, 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.

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 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, GitHb 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. 

‍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 Open Source is free to use. 

Airbyte Cloud provides a 14-day free trial (which starts after the 1st sync) 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 Cloud doesn’t charge for failed syncs or normalization. Airbyte offers adapted pricing to customers with volume discounts. Learn more about Airbyte's transparent pricing plans here.

Airbyte Enterprise is offered with a fixed contract, not volume-based. 

‍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.

Benefits of Airbyte

Choosing Airbyte over Stitch provides several compelling reasons:

• Largest catalog: Airbyte’s marketplace of connectors features the largest and fastest-growing catalog of connectors to help you address all your connector needs, both for structured and unstructured sources. All the low-code pre-built connectors are also customizable at will. 
• Full extensibility: Airbyte’s open data movement platform offers greater flexibility and customization options than Fivetran's proprietary solution. This openness allows users to tailor the platform to their specific needs and cover all their connector needs, while a closed-source solution like Stitch will force them to build in-house connectors that are brittle and hard to maintain for all the connectors that Stitch doesn’t support. 
• GenAI readiness: Airbyte supports both structured and unstructured sources and vector database destinations to power your genAI workflows. It also supports RAG-specific transformations, including chunking powered by LangChain and embeddings enabled by OpenAI, Cohere, and other providers, allowing you to load, transform, and store data in a single operation.
• Flexible deployment models: Airbyte can be deployed as cloud-hosted, self-hosted, or hybrid, so you can move your data, even the sensitive ones. This enables Airbyte to be the most Enterprise-ready platform regarding security and control. 
• Community: Airbyte has the most extensive data & AI engineering community around data movement. In addition to contributing connectors in the marketplace, this community shares support, advice, best practices, and more. 
• Absence of vendor lock-in: Due to its open-source nature, Airbyte Open Source will still be a good backup plan for any of Airbyte's customers. 

Limitations of Stitch:

• Proprietary Nature: Fivetran operates as a proprietary platform, limiting users' ability to access and modify the underlying code. Users cannot edit pre-built connectors at will and are limited in how they can build new custom connectors. 
• Limited Connector Availability: While Fivetran provides a wide range of pre-built connectors for popular data sources, it may not support all sources or destinations required by users. Organizations with specific integration needs may find themselves limited by the available connectors and may be forced to build in-house connectors that are brittle and hard to maintain. 
• No support for genAI workflows:  Fivetran doesn’t support unstructured sources or vector database destinations. 
• Limited deployment model: Fivetran is cloud-managed. Only HVR (database replication tool acquired by Fivetran) can be self-hosted. 
• Quality of Singer Integrations: While Stitch allows users to leverage Singer integrations for custom connectors, the quality of these integrations can vary. Many Singer connectors are not actively maintained, leading to potential issues with reliability and performance.
• Lack of Advanced Transformation Features: Stitch primarily focuses on data movement (ETL) rather than complex data transformations (ELT). While it provides basic transformation capabilities for compatibility with destination systems, it may not offer advanced transformation features required for sophisticated data processing requirements.
• Dependence on Cloud Infrastructure: Stitch is a cloud-based platform, which means users are reliant on the availability and performance of cloud infrastructure. This dependence can sometimes lead to issues related to network latency, data transfer speeds, and uptime, affecting overall data integration operations.

FAQs

• What sets Airbyte apart from Stitch?
  Airbyte and Stitch are both data integration/ETL solutions, but Airbyte stands out as the leading open data movement platform offering over 300 data connectors, compared to Stitch's 130. Airbyte also brings full extensibility with its open-sourceness and Connector Builder. Airbyte offers several deployment models (cloud-hosted, self-hosted, hybrid), while Stitch is a cloud-based platform for ETL, part of the Talend Data Fabric. Finally, Airbyte supports all AI use cases and integrate with unstructured sources, vector databases, to address LLM use cases.

• What are the key features provided by Airbyte and Stitch?
  Airbyte prioritizes ELT as its primary approach, with reverse-ETL planned for 2025. It supports over 300 sources and is compatible with all major data destinations. Conversely, Stitch specializes in data ingestion and ELT, supporting more than 100 database and SaaS integrations.

• How customizable are the connectors in Airbyte and Stitch?
  Airbyte empowers users to edit pre-built connectors and develop new ones within hours using the Connector Builder. In contrast, Stitch offers Stitch Import AI for pushing data to destinations but lacks the same level of connector customization.

• What transformation capabilities do Airbyte and Stitch offer?
  Airbyte serves as a data movement platform, providing two extraction options and enabling custom transformations via SQL or integration with dbt. Meanwhile, Stitch focuses on transformations necessary for destination compatibility but does not extend to additional transformation features.

• How do Airbyte and Stitch cater to unique data integration needs?
  Airbyte offers modularity in its architecture, allowing users to utilize any part of the platform, edit connectors, or swiftly build custom ones. In contrast, Stitch permits customers to create custom connectors using Singer but faces challenges in maintaining connector quality.

• What support and documentation options are available for Airbyte and Stitch users?
  Both Airbyte and Stitch provide comprehensive documentation and in-app chat support. Airbyte boasts a rapid average response time of 5 minutes and maintains an active community on Slack and Discourse. Similarly, Stitch offers phone support for enterprise clients and follows an open-source documentation model.

• How do the pricing models of Airbyte and Stitch differ?
  Airbyte employs credit-based pricing with varying rates for APIs, databases, and files, effectively adapting to diverse use cases, including database replication. It also offers a 14-day free trial or $1,000 worth of credits. Conversely, Stitch utilizes volume-based pricing based on synced rows, with standard plans ranging from $100 to $1,250 per month depending on scale, offering discounts for annual payments.