Feature Comparison: Airbyte vs. Stitch
Explore Airbyte, the leading data movement platform, as an alternative to Stitch. Compare their data sources, features, pricing, and more to understand their distinctions and benefits.
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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 provide the largest and fastest-growing catalog of connectors, with over 550 offerings.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Airbyte
Airbyte Open Source is free to use.
Airbyte Cloud provides a 14-day free trial (which starts after the 1st sync). Its pricing is based on the GBs or rows of data. Airbyte Cloud doesn’t charge for failed syncs or normalization. In hindsight, Teams and Enterprise editions are capacity-based, where the pricing depends on the number of pipelines syncing data simultaneously. Learn more about Airbyte's transparent pricing plans here.
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.
Choosing Airbyte over Stitch provides several compelling reasons:
Discover the keys to enhancing data pipeline performance while minimizing costs with this benchmark analysis by McKnight Consulting Group.
Airbyte is the leading open data movement platform, created in July 2020. Airbyte offers more than 550 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.
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.
Airbyte has become our single point of data integration. We continuously migrate our connectors from our existing solutions to Airbyte as they became available, and extensibly leverage their connector builder on Airbyte Cloud.
Airbyte helped us accelerate our progress by years, compared to our competitors. We don’t need to worry about connectors and focus on creating value for our users instead of building infrastructure. That’s priceless. The time and energy saved allows us to disrupt and grow faster.
We chose Airbyte for its ease of use, its pricing scalability and its absence of vendor lock-in. Having a lean team makes them our top criteria.
The value of being able to scale and execute at a high level by maximizing resources is immense