22 Best Data Engineering Tools You Can Try in 2024

Data engineering is a crucial component of modern-day data processing. It involves the use of various tools and technologies to design, build, and manage data pipelines, ensuring that data is processed quickly, efficiently, and accurately. This article explores the top seven data engineering tools along with their unique features.

What are Data Engineering Tools?

Data engineering tools are essential software applications that facilitate the collection, organization, storage, and processing of large volumes of data from various sources. These tools have become increasingly important in recent years due to the growth of big data. Big data refers to large data sets that are too complex and extensive to be processed by traditional data processing techniques.

Data engineering tools will assist you in handling the technical complexities that come with handling data. By leveraging the specific tools, you can eliminate the need to deal with intricate data management processes and instead focus on extracting valuable insights from your data.

Top 22 Data Engineering Tools in 2024

With numerous options available, the following are the top data engineering tools that you can use to manage ever-growing volumes of data.

Airbyte

Airbyte is a data integration and replication platform that helps you replicate data from various sources to a destination of your choice. It offers a wide range of over 550 pre-built connectors to streamline data integration. These connectors enable you to seamlessly transfer data from the source to the destination without writing any code. This makes building data pipelines accessible to everyone regardless of technical expertise. 

Key Features:

• Ease of Use: Airbyte's user-friendly interface and no-code approach make it easy to set up and manage your data integration pipelines.‍
• Connector Builder: If the required source is unavailable in the pre-built list, Airbyte provides a Connector Development Kit (CDK) and a Connector Builder. The Connector Builder facilitates the creation of custom connectors using AI-assist functionality, which auto-fills most UI fields by reading through the preferred platform’s API documentation. ‍
• Change Data Capture: It simplifies data synchronization with its CDC feature, efficiently capturing and synchronizing only the changes made to databases. This ensures that data records are always up-to-date and accurate.‍
• dbt Integration: To perform customs transformations, you can integrate Airbyte with dbt. This ensures that data at the destination is compatible with usable formats suitable for analysis.‍
• Self-Managed Enterprise: Airbyte offers an enterprise version that allows you to manage large-scale data. It includes features like role-based access control (RBAC), personally identifiable information (PII) masking, and enterprise support with SLAs.‍
• Advanced Security: Airbyte takes data security and compliance seriously. It has incorporated various measures, including encryption and access controls, to ensure data safety. Airbyte adheres to industry-specific regulations, such as HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO 27001, to ensure data privacy and security.

Amazon Redshift

Redshift is a popular cloud-based data warehousing service offered by AWS. It provides numerous benefits compared to traditional relational databases, such as scalability, performance, and ease of administration. Additionally, Redshift leverages columnar storage, a method where data is stored in columns rather than rows. This approach optimizes query performance, especially for analytical workloads.

‍Key Features:

• The Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture of Redshift allows it to distribute and parallelize queries across multiple nodes. This results in delivering exceptional performance at any scale.
• Its data sharing feature allows instant data access across clusters without copying or moving it, providing consistent, up-to-date information.
• As a fully managed data warehouse, it takes care of infrastructure, auto-scaling, and automatic resource management.
• Redshift's dynamic data masking (DDM) feature provides robust protection for sensitive data. This feature enables you to limit the amount of identifiable information visible to users. You can also set up multiple levels of permissions for these fields.
• It offers a powerful concurrency scaling feature that guarantees smooth and fast query processing for workloads that require high concurrency performance.

Snowflake

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing solution that can effectively handle large volumes of structured and semi-structured data. The platform's unique hybrid architecture combines shared-disk and shared-nothing databases, delivering quick results. It uses a central repository for data storage that is accessible from all the compute nodes, similar to a shared-disk. Additionally, it processes queries using MPP, where each node stores a portion of the entire dataset locally, similar to shared-nothing architecture.

‍Key Features:

• With Snowflake, you have the flexibility to adjust your storage and compute resources independently. This lets you easily scale up or down as required without any unnecessary costs.
• It supports multiple virtual warehouses, which are clusters of one or more compute nodes for query processing. All these warehouses are isolated from each other, ensuring that workloads running on one warehouse do not affect the performance of others.
• Snowflake has a built-in query optimization engine that automatically enhances query performance without manual tuning.
• With Snowflake, you have the flexibility to select from a variety of cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. This feature lets you choose the cloud provider that best meets your needs and switch to another provider if required.
• Snowflake’s zero-copy cloning enables the creation of schema or database clones without physically duplicating data. This empowers you to create multiple clones without additional storage costs.

BigQuery

BigQuery is a cloud-based data warehousing and analytics platform that lets you store and analyze massive amounts of data in real time. With BigQuery, you can effortlessly query and analyze your data using SQL-like syntax, making it accessible to users familiar with standard database query languages. The platform supports different data types ranging from simple numbers to complex arrays.

‍Key Features:

• BigQuery natively supports Geographic Information System (GIS) for obtaining insights from geographic data points, represented using latitudes and longitudes coordinates.
• It integrates with other Google services like Google Analytics and Google Ads, providing a seamless connection between your data warehouse and these platforms.
• BigQuery automatically replicates data and keeps a seven-day history of changes, allowing you to smoothly restore and compare data from different times.
• BigQuery's BI engine is scalable and distributed, enabling you to query terabytes of data within seconds and petabytes in minutes.

Microsoft Power BI

Power BI helps you to analyze and visualize data from various sources. It works by connecting to different data sets, like spreadsheets or databases, and then representing that data into easy-to-understand charts and graphs. These visualizations can then be arranged into reports and dashboards, making it simple to see trends and insights in your data. You can also share these reports with others, promoting collaboration and decision-making based on the data.

‍Key Features:

• Power BI provides interactive visualizations that help you explore your data in a more engaging and meaningful way.
• It incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), to enhance data analysis. 
• Power BI is highly extensible, with a rich set of APIs and open-source libraries that empower you to customize and extend the platform to fit your needs.
• It provides an on-premises data gateway that enables secure connectivity between Power BI services in the cloud and on-premise data sources.
• Power BI empowers you to seamlessly import and transform data from different sources using Power Query without coding expertise. 

dbt (Data Build Tool)

dbt is an open-source command line tool that helps you transform data in the warehouse effectively. It is known for the transformation layer of the modern data analytics stack. dbt doesn’t extract or load data; instead, it is best at performing data transformations using SQL and Python models.

‍Key Features:

• With dbt, you can write all of your data transformations as SQL queries. The Structured Query Language is well-known and easy to use, making it accessible to a wide range of users.
• It automatically generates and maintains documentation for your data models, which is essential for tracking the data lineage and understanding its transformations.
• dbt runs unit tests automatically on each data model to guarantee data quality.
• It seamlessly integrates with Git, providing robust version control capabilities for your data transformation projects.

Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source, distributed stream-processing platform that facilitates data ingestion, processing, storage, and analysis at a large scale. It enables you to create real-time data pipelines, ideally suited for handling continuous data streams. The platform runs as a resilient, fault-tolerant cluster that can span several servers and multiple data centers, ensuring high availability.

‍Key Features:

• Kafka is renowned for its ability to offer high throughput and low-latency performance, making it a perfect choice for streaming real-time data.
• It is optimized for a multi-language environment, allowing you to interact with it using Scala, Java, C++, Python, and more. 
• Kafka guarantees that messages will be delivered exactly once, ensuring data consistency.
• It divides data into partitions, allowing for parallel processing and scalability. Each partition can be processed independently, enhancing performance.
• To ensure fault-tolerant storage of messages, Kafka employs a replication mechanism where each message is written to multiple nodes. This approach guarantees that data is not lost in a failure.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL, commonly known as Postgres, is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). It's known for its reliability, flexibility, and support of open technical standards. It supports SQL for querying and data manipulation and is highly customizable to suit a variety of applications.

Key Features:

• PostgreSQL's ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) properties ensure that transactions are reliable and correct when writing or updating data.
• PostgreSQL offers SSL encryption and authentication methods like LDAP, Kerberos, and GSSAPI to protect data from unauthorized access.
• PostgreSQL supports asynchronous, synchronous, and cascade replication, depending on the use case.

Apache NiFi

Apache NiFi is an open-source data integration tool designed for the automation of data flow between systems. It supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic. NiFi provides a web-based user interface to manage data flows in real time, enabling easy monitoring and management of data ingestion, transformation, and delivery.

Key Features:

• NiFi supports a range of data sources and destinations, enabling seamless integration across diverse systems, databases, and file formats.
• With a rich set of processors, NiFi allows data to be filtered, enriched, normalized and transformed as it moves through the flow, ensuring it meets the required format and quality standards.
• NiFi's powerful routing capabilities enable conditional data flows based on content, schema, or other criteria, ensuring that data is delivered to the correct destination.
• The tool provides a visual interface for building and managing data flows, making it easy to design, monitor, and modify workflows without deep coding knowledge.
• NiFi supports both batch and real-time data processing, allowing for immediate insights and timely data-driven decision-making.

Talend

Talend is a software integration platform that helps businesses manage data from multiple sources and turn it into business insights. It offers a suite of applications to address various aspects of data integration, data quality, and data governance. Talend is a widely used data engineering tool for its robust ETL capabilities and easy integration with a multitude of data sources.

Key Features:

• Talend provides end-to-end ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes, enabling efficient data extraction from various sources, transformation according to business rules, and loading into target systems.
• It supports connectivity to a wide range of data sources including databases, cloud storage, applications, and more, ensuring seamless integration across different data environments.
• Talend includes built-in tools for data profiling, data cleansing, and data enrichment, ensuring high data quality and consistency throughout the integration process.
• Talend supports both real-time and batch data processing, allowing businesses to handle streaming data for real-time analytics as well as large-scale batch processing for extensive data transformation tasks.

Apache Hadoop

Apache Hadoop is an open-source framework that enables the processing of large datasets across distributed computing environments. It is designed to scale from a single server to thousands of machines, offering robust and reliable data storage and processing capabilities.

Key Features:

• Scalable storage system that replicates data across multiple nodes for fault tolerance and high throughput.
• Parallel processing framework that distributes data processing tasks across the cluster, providing fault tolerance and flexibility.
• Resource management layer that allocates cluster resources efficiently and supports multi-tenancy.
• Provides Kerberos authentication, role-based access control, and data encryption for security.

Apache Spark

Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine developed for large-scale data processing. It's known for its speed, ease of use, and sophisticated analytics capabilities, making it a popular choice among data engineers for big data applications. Spark supports various data sources, including Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Apache Cassandra, Apache HBase, and Amazon S3.

Key Features:

• Apache Spark provides a unified platform for big data processing, allowing data engineers to perform batch processing, stream processing, and interactive querying in a single framework. 
• Stores data in memory for faster access than traditional disk-based systems, significantly speeding up processing times.
• Recovers data easily and maintains consistency without extra work through its resilient distributed datasets (RDDs).
• Provides an easy-to-use programming interface, allowing programmers to quickly and easily work with large amounts of data using familiar languages and APIs.
• Built-in support for machine learning algorithms and analytics that can parallelly execute queries on large data sets via MLlib.

Dagster

Dagster is a data orchestration tool designed to simplify and streamline complex data workflows. It provides a unified framework for developing, managing, and monitoring data pipelines, enabling data engineers to build reliable, scalable, and maintainable data systems.

Key Features:

• Dagster offers a cohesive framework for developing, managing, and monitoring data pipelines, integrating seamlessly with other data engineering tools and systems.
• Dagster ensures data types are explicitly defined and validated, reducing runtime errors and improving pipeline reliability.
• The tool promotes reusability by allowing components of data pipelines to be modularized and reused across different workflows.
• Pipelines and their configurations can be versioned and snapshotted, enabling easy rollbacks and historical analysis of data flows.

Metabase

Metabase is an open-source business intelligence (BI) tool designed to simplify the process of exploring and analyzing data. It enables users to create, share, and visualize data insights without requiring extensive technical skills. Metabase is ideal for organizations looking to democratize data access and empower all team members to make data-driven decisions.

Key Features:

• Metabase supports embedding charts and dashboards into other applications or websites, enabling seamless integration of analytics into existing workflows.
• Users can create interactive, customizable dashboards to monitor key metrics and KPIs, providing real-time insights into business performance.
• It provides a powerful query builder that lets users create complex queries without needing to write SQL, although it also supports raw SQL for advanced users.
• Metabase includes collaborative features such as sharing, commenting, and versioning, enabling teams to work together effectively on data analysis.
• It facilitates ad hoc data exploration, allowing users to quickly drill down into data and discover insights without pre-built reports.

Tableau

Tableau is a visual analytics platform that helps people and organizations use data to solve problems. It's designed to be user-friendly, with an intuitive interface that translates drag-and-drop actions into data queries. Tableau's products support data prep, analysis, governance, and collaboration. 

Key Features:

• Tableau allows users to create interactive, visually appealing dashboards that can be customized and shared across the organization.
• It supports a wide range of data sources, including databases, spreadsheets, cloud services, and big data platforms, ensuring seamless data integration.
• Tableau enables real-time data analysis, allowing users to get up-to-date insights and make timely decisions.
• The tool offers a variety of advanced visualization options, including charts, graphs, maps, and more, to represent data in the most effective way.
• Tableau includes powerful geospatial analysis capabilities, enabling users to visualize and analyze spatial data with maps and geographic insights.

Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is a distributed event streaming platform designed for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. It is highly scalable, fault-tolerant, and provides a robust framework for handling high-throughput, low-latency data feeds. Kafka is widely used for log aggregation, real-time analytics, and integrating different systems through data streams.

Key Features:

• Kafka can handle large volumes of data, making it suitable for applications that require rapid data ingestion and processing.
• It provides strong durability and fault tolerance through data replication across multiple brokers, ensuring data reliability even in the event of hardware failures.
• Kafka includes the Kafka Streams library, which allows for complex event processing and stateful stream processing directly within the Kafka ecosystem.
• Kafka supports a publish-subscribe messaging model, enabling the decoupling of data producers and consumers and allowing multiple consumers to read data from the same topic independently.
• Kafka integrates with Confluent Schema Registry to manage and enforce data schemas, ensuring data compatibility and evolution over time.

MongoDB

MongoDB is a popular open-source NoSQL database designed for modern application development. It is known for its flexibility, scalability, and performance, making it suitable for a wide range of use cases, from small-scale applications to large enterprise solutions. MongoDB stores data in a flexible, JSON-like format, which allows for dynamic schemas and easier integration with various data sources.

Key Features:

• MongoDB uses a document-oriented data model, allowing for dynamic schemas that can evolve with application needs. This flexibility makes it easy to store complex data structures.
• MongoDB supports horizontal scaling through sharding, enabling it to handle large volumes of data and high-traffic applications by distributing data across multiple servers.
• It offers a powerful query language with support for ad hoc queries, indexing, and aggregation, allowing for complex data retrieval and manipulation.
• The database includes built-in replication features, providing high availability and data redundancy through replica sets. This ensures data durability and fault tolerance.
• MongoDB can distribute read and write operations across multiple servers, balancing the load and improving overall system performance.

Data Version Control

Data Version Control (DVC) is an open-source tool designed to manage machine learning projects by versioning data, models, and code. It aims to bring the best practices of software engineering, like version control and continuous integration, to the world of machine learning and data science. DVC helps teams to collaborate more effectively, track changes, and reproduce experiments reliably.

Key Features:

• By tracking the complete history of data, code, and models, DVC ensures that experiments are fully reproducible, making it easier to validate results and collaborate with others.
• DVC provides tools to define and manage complex data processing pipelines, ensuring that all steps in the machine learning workflow are tracked and can be reproduced.
• It supports large datasets and complex workflows, making it suitable for both small projects and large-scale machine learning initiatives.
• DVC supports various remote storage backends, including cloud storage services like AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob Storage, enabling easy data sharing and collaboration.
• DVC integrates seamlessly with Git, allowing users to version control data and models alongside their code, facilitating better collaboration and project management.

Great Expectations

Great Expectations is an open-source data validation tool that helps data teams ensure the quality and integrity of their data. It provides a framework for defining, executing, and documenting expectations about data, making it easier to detect and resolve data issues before they impact downstream processes and analyses.

Key Features:

• The tool supports automated testing of data against defined expectations, enabling continuous monitoring and validation of data quality.
• Great Expectations includes data profiling capabilities that help users understand the shape distribution of their data, identifying potential issues and anomalies.
• It generates detailed, human-readable documentation of data expectations, test results, and validation reports, making it easier to communicate data quality standards across teams.

Terraform

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that helps developers build, change, and version cloud and on-premises resources. It uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to describe desired infrastructure, then generates a plan to reach that state and runs it to provision the infrastructure. Terraform also provides plugins called providers that allow users to interact with cloud providers and other APIs.

Key Features:

• Terraform generates an execution plan showing what actions will be taken to achieve the desired state, allowing users to review changes before they are applied.
• Users can create reusable modules to encapsulate common infrastructure patterns, promoting best practices and reducing duplication.
• As an open-source tool, Terraform benefits from a vibrant community that contributes plugins, modules, and best practices, and it can be extended to meet specific needs.

Docker

Docker is a platform designed to simplify the development, deployment, and operation of applications by using containerization. Containers enable developers to package applications with all their dependencies into a standardized unit for software development, ensuring consistency across multiple environments and simplifying the deployment process.

Key Features:

• Each Docker container operates in its own isolated environment, ensuring that applications do not interfere with one another and enhancing security.
• Docker enables rapid deployment of applications by allowing developers to quickly build, test, and deploy containers.
• Docker integrates seamlessly with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools, automating the build, test, and deployment processes.
• Docker has a rich ecosystem of tools and services, including Docker Compose for defining multi-container applications, Docker Swarm for container orchestration, and third-party plugins and integrations.
• Docker Hub is a cloud-based repository service that allows developers to store and share container images, streamlining the process of distributing applications.

Delta Lake

Delta Lake is an open-source storage layer that brings reliability to data lakes. Built on top of Apache Spark, it provides ACID transactions, scalable metadata handling, and unified streaming and batch data processing. Delta Lake enables organizations to build robust and high-performance data pipelines and ensures data quality and consistency.

Key Features:

• The tool enforces schema checks to ensure data quality and supports schema evolution, allowing changes to the data structure without breaking existing pipelines.
• It supports data compaction, reducing the number of small files and improving query performance by organizing data into larger, more efficient files.
• The tool maintains a transaction log that records all changes to data, providing a reliable audit trail and enabling recovery from failures.

Emerging Trends in Data Engineering Tools & Technologies

There's a noticeable shift towards fully managed cloud services, which offer scalability and ease of use. 

DataOps and MLOps platforms are gaining popularity due to their ability to automate and streamline data engineering processes, improving efficiency and collaboration. Visual ETL and pipeline tools are becoming more prevalent, allowing easier data manipulation and transformation through intuitive interfaces. 

AI integration in data engineering tools is enhancing capabilities like anomaly detection, data quality monitoring, and automated data processing, making data workflows more intelligent and efficient.

How do You Evaluate And Find The Most Promising Data Engineering Tools?

1. Scalability:

Ensure the tool can handle both current and future data volumes efficiently.

2. Integration Capability:

Verify that the tool integrates seamlessly with your existing systems and other tools in your stack.

3. Ease of Use and Learning Curve:

Consider how easy it is for your team to adopt and use the tool effectively.

4. Cost and Licensing:

Assess the total cost of ownership, including licensing fees, maintenance costs, and any hidden expenses.

5. Community Support and Documentation:

Look for robust community support, comprehensive documentation, and reliable service.

Tool Stack Examples

Use Case 1: Real-Time Data Analytics

• Airbyte (Role: Data Ingestion and ETL)
• Kafka (Role: Data Streaming)
• Flink (Role: Stream Processing)
• Cassandra (Role: Data Storage)
• Superset (Role: Data Visualization)

Use Case 2: Machine Learning Pipeline

• Airflow (Role: Workflow Orchestration)
• Spark (Role: Data Processing)
• S3 (Role: Data Storage)
• MLflow (Role: Experiment Tracking and Model Management)

Conclusion

Data engineering is a crucial aspect of the modern-day data stack. The right set of tools can help you streamline data processing, improve data quality, and enhance data analytics. The seven data engineering tools discussed are some of the most popular and effective tools available in 2024. By leveraging these tools, you can ensure that data is processed efficiently, allowing you to gain valuable insights and make data-driven decisions.

If you’re looking for a reliable data integration tool that automates data pipelines efficiently, we recommend using Airbyte. You can try Airbyte Cloud or download Airbyte Open-Source and deploy it in your own infrastructure.