In this crowd of potential solutions, how do you narrow it down to the winning horse?
Here we compare side-by-side three ETL tools - Fivetran, Stitch data, and Keboola to shed light on their respective strengths and weaknesses across these areas:
Integrations
Transformation
Advanced analytics, data visualizations, and machine learning
Security
Pricing
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Overview of the three solutions (one goes the extra mile)
Fivetran, Stitch, and Keboola are all cloud-based data platforms. They are built around the idea that software can help you automate your data processes and data pipelines at scale. Thus saving your engineers, scientists, and analysts time for more revenue-generating work.
But the three contenders have very different ranges of capabilities:
Fivetran and Stitch focus solely on data ingestion and ETL. That is, they help you automatically extract data from Third-Party Apps, load them into databases, data warehouses, or data lakes, and they might help you transform the data.
Keboola, on the other hand, is a data platform as a service. By focusing on the entire data operations process - instead of just the first mile - Keboola builds tools to help you extract insights faster. Alongside its extensive ETL capabilities, Keboola can be used for data governance, machine learning prototyping, data pipeline monitoring, data management, and a myriad of other operations.
Data integration is the process in which ETL tools extract raw data from a source, transform the data, and load it into a target destination (data warehouses or data lakes).
All three platforms allow you to perform extract and load operations in a user-friendly manner. No need for technical knowledge, all you need is a couple of clicks in your browser to automatically connect your new data sources and destinations and start syncing data.
So how do the three providers differ?
Fivetran
Over 160 data sources and destinations.
Does not support community-built integrations.
How-to guides, but no open source integrations.
New data sources are added per request basis.
Stitch
Over 130 data sources and destinations.
Supports community-built applications.
Open source integrations.
You can develop a new integration using Singer, an open source project.
Open source integrations that allow you to dive deeper into understanding what the integration does and alter it if needed.
Generic component that enables data import from almost any REST API and countless other APIs. The component acts as a customizable HTTP REST client.
Transformations
Transformations refer to all the procedures needed to make your data valuable. For example, cleaning your data to exclude corrupted information, adjusting the data types to match source and destination data, removing duplicates, etc.
Fivetran
Only post-load transformations
Offers dbt transformations
Stitch
Doesn’t offer full data transformations. Stitch is used to extract and load your data, then you have to rely on other software (such as Talend Data Fabric) for transformations.
Keboola
Offers both preload transformations and postload transformations.
Premade components that do the transformation for you.
Fully custom-written transformations in the programming language engineers and scientists love best (SQL, Python, R, Julia, …).
Advanced analytics, data visualizations, and machine learning
Good and clean data on its own is not enough to gain better insights. You also have to analyze it, visualize it, and sometimes productionalize it with machine learning, to extract the business value from your data assets.
All three data platforms integrate with a variety of BI tools and AI applications, such as Looker, Google Analytics, Jupyter notebooks, etc.
Where Keboola truly shines, and what sets it apart from Fivetran and Stitch, is the ecosystem for analytics, data engineering, and data science built for data operatives. Keboola, unlike the competitors, does not just integrate with other data tools, but it also offers:
Development branches, which allow for experimentation. Your data professionals can test and try different data products without worrying about breaking the production environment to iterate faster and gain insights at unprecedented speeds.
Data Catalog for both documenting data and sharing data. Understanding the data you work with is integral to developing quality analytical products. Being able to share data allows collaboration across people and departments, as well as reproducibility of data experiments when building data-centered products.
Orchestrators that make it easy for you to automate ETL processes, so you always work with fresh data.
Security
All three platforms offer state-of-the-art security provisioning:
External security audits and certification renewals.
Etc.
The only difference is the type of security offered for different plans.
Fivetran
Fivetran offers safe VPN tunnels for data transfers only on their most expensive plan (if you pay less, you will have to SSH or find another solution).
Secure data even on the freemium model. Keboola does not believe paying customers are the only ones who need data protection.
Support
All three data platforms offer varying methods of support: phone support, in-app chat support, training services (like the Keboola Data Academy), enterprise SLA, etc.
However, there are differences in the quality of support. As can be seen from reviews and ratings of the three data products, users are not equally satisfied with all three platforms:
Multiple reviewers also comment about their inability to debug issues themselves and having to wait on Fivetran’s technical support to solve connector issues on Fivetran’s end.
Stitch
Although Stitch is praised for their immediate support, recently clients started to comment that ever since Stitch was acquired by Talend, there hasn’t been any significant development.
Keboola
100 % of reviews on G2.com praise Keboola’s support for being very responsive and for going above and beyond.
All three data platforms are transparent with their pricing (praise the world of SaaS which does not hide this information), but vary widely in how they price their products.
Fivetran
No free plan, only a 14-day free trial.
Pricing is calculated with custom calculation of “monthly active rows” (MARs) and associated credits. MAR refers to the unique number of rows that were inserted, deleted, or updated within a calendar month. Their credit-to-row calculations are not straightforward because the price of a credit varies based on the number of rows that are active in a given month and the tier of the plan your organization has paid.
Stitch
No free plan, only a 14-day free trial.
The volume-based pricing starts at $100/month for 5 million processed rows (aka, all the imported, exported, and transformed rows are counted at every touchpoint).
Their standard plan does not offer custom sources and limits users to a maximum of 10 standard sources.
Keboola
Offers an always free plan (300 processing minutes for free, every month)
Instead of rows, you are charged for the Time of processing.
Every account gets 300 free minutes a month (free plan), then pays 14 cents per minute. In case your needs are greater, custom subscription plans are available.
Schedule a demo or request a personalized consultation
The ultimate choice of which data platform best serves your company’s needs depends on, well, your company’s needs.
In this article we compared side-by-side three of the main contenders for your ETL and data operations needs:
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