Fivetran vs Airbyte Comparison: Understand Which a Better Platform

Table of content

1. Fivetran Overview
2. Airbyte Overview
3. Who Are Fivetran and Airbyte For?
4. Fivetran vs Airbyte: Data Source Connectors
5. Fivetran vs Airbyte: Data Destinations
6. Fivetran vs Airbyte: Pricing
7. Fivetran vs Airbyte: Ratings
8. Fivetran vs Airbyte: Ease of Use
9. Fivetran vs Airbyte: Support
10. Fivetran vs Airbyte: Security and Reliability
11. Summary

Fivetran and Airbyte are two of the leading data integration platforms in the market. Fivetran started operations in 2012 and has developed 500+ data connectors. Airbyte, on the other hand, started in 2020 and has 300+ data source connectors. The main difference between the two platforms is that Airbyte is an open-source solution, meaning the connectors are publicly accessible, and anyone can use and modify them as they deem fit. Fivetran is a closed-source data integration solution. Here are other factors you should consider when comparing Fivetran vs Airbyte.

Fivetran Overview

Fivetran is a data movement platform with 500+ data source connectors and more than 15 destinations. The data source connectors include ERP systems, SaaS applications, files, enterprise apps, and others. The destinations are mainly databases, data lakes, and data warehouses. Pricing is dependent on monthly active rows (MAR). This means that pricing is not independent of data row counts. MAR, as used by Fivetran, refers to the number of data rows that are modified or added during a given month. Fivetran offers a free forever plan for low data volumes. The screen below shows the functioning of Fivetran when data hosting is on-premise with Snowflake as the destination. Fivetran also has cloud storage and hybrid data hosting solutions.

Airbyte Overview

Airbyte has 300+ data source connectors. It is promoted as the data analytics platform for LLMs, AI engineers, data engineers, data analysts, and analytics engineers. Being an open-source data movement platform means you can access all connectors for free. There are no premium connectors. The free-for-life open-source plan is self-hosted. However, if you need cloud hosting by Airbyte, the price will depend on your data needs. For instance, if you are to replicate about 30 GB of data per month and change or modify 1 million data rows, the price would be about $315/month. Take note that this is not the price for connectors, as all connectors are accessible for free. The pricing is for cloud storage and support from Airbyte.

Who Are Fivetran and Airbyte For?

Fivetran is a data movement platform for business organizations. It is designed to help businesses move all types of data from enterprise applications, ERP systems, SaaS platforms, and databases. To facilitate business activities, Fivetran offers a broad variety of data source connectors, enabling organizations to extract, move, and analyze different types of data, including marketing, finance, sales, and support data. Fivetran targets businesses in retail, financial services, and manufacturing.

Airbyte equally targets business organizations with solutions to move marketing, finance, sales, product, and other data. However, Airbyte goes beyond transferring data for organizational needs to include data integrations for the training of LLMs and AI models. Airbyte has been at the forefront in enabling data integrations for use in training models for generative AI. Based on the target users, Airbyte emerges as a more agile data integration platform, especially for big data.

Fivetran vs Airbyte: Data Source Connectors

Fivetran has 500+ data source connectors, while AIrbyte offers 300+. On both platforms, all connectors are available at all pricing levels. Unlimited access to connectors means there are no premium connectors. Unlimited access to data source connectors is important because the two data integration platforms focus on moving big data and charge the users based on the volume of modified data in terms of data rows per month.

Fivetran vs Airbyte: Data Destinations

Fivetran offers access to 15 data destinations, while Airbyte has more than 30. The destinations are mainly databases. On both platforms, users can select either on-prem data hosting or managed cloud service. Fivetran also offers a hybrid of self-managed storage and cloud storage, which the company manages. The destinations also include API access. Some of the destinations on Fivetran include MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Amazon S3, Snowflake, and IBM Db2. The destinations on Airbyte include all of the above and more, such as Clickhouse, Cockroachdb, Convexdev, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, and Hana Database. Notice that Airbyte has a broader variety of destinations.

Data destinations influence the pricing plans, and database destinations are not independent of the data row count. On Fivetran, all prices are based on MAR. However, Airbyte separates database storage from API calls so that the pricing for database storage is based on the volume of data measured in GB. In contrast, API calls are based on the volume of modified data rows. In both platforms, the volume of data rows is computed monthly. Each modified row is counted once, even if modified multiple times within the month.

Fivetran vs Airbyte: Pricing

Fivetran does not publish pricing data on its website. However, it shows that there are four types of data plans. All connectors are available on all pricing levels, meaning there are no premium connectors. The first plan is the free plan for users with up to 500,000 monthly active rows. The other plans include Starter, Standard, Enterprise, Business Critical, and Private Deployment. None of the plans has a price tag. Similarly, the plans do not include the most critical pricing component, the data volume in monthly active rows. If you are on the Standard plan or higher, Fivetran allows unlimited users.

While we know that Fivetran does not publish pricing information, it publishes a price comparison tool that shows the approximate cost of your data plan based on the data volume. Analysis shows that organizations on the standard plan with small data volume can incur as high as $900 per million MAR. The price diminishes with increased data such that users with less than 250 thousand MAR pay the highest price. At 500 thousand MAR, the price is $800 per million MAR. This declines to $750 per million MAR for users with 1 million MAR. Users with 4 million MAR can pay a price of $400 per million MAR. The pricing structure favors organizations with large data volumes. Fivetran’s pricing curve is presented below.

Airbyte pricing starts with the free-for-life open-source deployment plan, for which the only costs to the users are the costs of self-hosting. The next plan is the Cloud option, under which Airbyte hosts the data. The plan attracts a price of $10 per GB of data and $15 per million data rows exported through API. You can also test the Cloud hosting plan for free. The other two pricing plans, Teams and Enterprise, require speaking with sales. The two plans do not have free trials. All connectors are available on all pricing levels, meaning there are no premium connectors. Here is how Airbyte’s cloud pricing works.

Considering that Fivetran’s pricing ranges between $400 and $900 per million MAR, and Airbyte charges about $15 per million data rows, this analysis deduces that Airbyte is more cost-efficient than Fivetran. Fivetran would be exorbitantly expensive for businesses of all sizes. The pricing structure on Fivetran also makes it more difficult for the users to manage the costs of data integration. While the price per million MAR reduces with an increase in the data volumes, organizations would find difficulties managing the cost. This is especially where they have little control over the data volumes because both a reduction and increase in data volumes can actually result in higher data integration costs. As such, Airbyte is priced better than Fivetran.

Fivetran vs Airbyte: Ratings

Fivetran’s rating is 4.2, lower than Airbyte’s 4.5. The ratings are consistent with our views about the two platforms. For instance, Fivetran makes it difficult to compare prices and could also be more costly than Airbyte. Airbyte has more use cases that include data integrations for LLMs and AI training models. Additionally, Airbyte has a free-for-life open-source plan that does not limit the number of data rows transformed with the Airbyte connectors. These factors explain why Airbyte has a better rating than Fivetran.

Fivetran vs Airbyte: Ease of Use

The key pillar in the ease of use of data integrators is the availability of pre-built connectors. Both platforms have large numbers of pre-built data source connectors. As such, both platforms are rated highly on ease of use. The ease of use means non-technical users can still operate with the data source connectors on the two platforms.

Airbyte is interesting for technical users like data scientists, engineers, and analysts, who have knowledge of python programming and other coding abilities. That is because the platform enables the users to use and even edit the code of the connectors to customize the connectors to their needs. Being open-source also simplifies how the users find solutions for data integration. In general, both platforms are easy to use, but Airbyte offers more features that simplify the work of skilled data experts.

Overall, both Fivetran and Airbyte are easy to use if you use pre-built connectors. However, it is instructive to note that Airbyte offers customizable connectors, which may require coding skills and code maintenance. Users should be careful when implementing versions of Airbyte solutions, depending on the technical capacity of the staff responsible for the implementation and use of the tools.

Fivetran vs Airbyte: Support

Fivetran provides support through the Fivetran Support Portal. The portal contains various features, including FAQs, support tickets, and support contacts. You must have an account to contact support through the portal. In addition to standard support, Enterprise customers get priority support, which means their tickets get first-priority attendance.

On Airbyte, support is first and foremost from the Airbyte community. That is because Airbyte offers open-source solutions and has attracted a large community of users. The second line of support is from the technical documentation about all the connectors. Using the documentation helps users to comprehensively answer any or all questions about the connectors. Technical documentation is most useful for technical users with coding skills and databases and data management capacities. Other than that, support on Airbyte includes tech support with 95% customer satisfaction scores. Enterprise customers get enterprise support based on respective SLAs.

Fivetran vs Airbyte: Security and Reliability

Fivetran and Airbyte are highly secure systems. Both platforms have SOC Type 2 compliance and provide single sign-on features. Beyond the two security properties, Airbyte is ISO 27001 certified and has GDPR compliance. Fivetran is compliant with GDPR and HIPAA. Lastly, Airbyte can make arrangements for more advanced security standards for users who are highly strict about the security of data.

Summary

A comprehensive comparison of Fivetran and Airbyte shows that Airbyte provides more value for money for its users. At $10 for every 10 GB of data moved to a database and $15 for every million data rows integrated through API, Airbyte is cheaper than Fivetran, whose prices can be as high as $900 per 1 million monthly active rows (MAR). The analysis also shows that Fivetran’s pricing often punishes users with small data volumes. The pricing of users with less than 0.25 million MAR is $900 per million MAR, and the price for users with more than 4 million MAR is about $400 per million MAR.

The only reason one would consider Fivetran is when Airbyte does not provide the data destinations or data source connectors of their needs, and the needs do not have the technical capacity to customize the open-source connectors from Airbyte. As such, it is recommended that users check for the pre-built connector on the two platforms and then consider the technical capacities needed to customize connectors before choosing the data integration platform.

Suppose your choice is not limited to Fivetran and Airbyte; you should also consider the data integration services provided by Windsor.ai. The platform offers codeless data integration services. You can also test the service for 30 days without any charges. Windsor.ai offers transparent volume-based pricing.

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