“Portable is fixed fee and supports Salesforce at scale. 1700 other connectors, but most clients that move from Fivetran to Portable for Salesforce love the predictability of pricing”
“We've found its a quarter of the cost of Fivetran, but they have fewer connectors and they tend to be less mature. Otherwise, vibe-coded API calls, which are so easy these days that it takes away half of Fivetran's USP.”
“We actually saved on cost switching to Fivetran away from Openflow for one of our use cases. Openflow charges a daily flat rate for having a deployment open, then a daily flat rate for having a runtime open depending on the size of the nodes you configure.”
“I've used another product called Datachannel, they are a small company providing similar features as Fivetran. You can pull data from various sources into Snowflake, write DBT models and push them into a Git Repo and make use of the DBT orchestration available in their ecosystem.”
“We are looking for alternatives to Fivetran due to escalating ingestion costs. We strictly need an ingestion tool (we handle all transformations via dbt).”
“While using fivetran I dont seem to find a way to continue sync after upgrading postgres DB. Since this requires dropping of replication slots, Fivetran will require full historical re-sync right? If anyone has prior experience in this, how did you handle it.”
“I agree that the pricing is a bit expensive and Lakeflow is affordable but it will depend on the connector you are looking for and also how much integration you are looking for.”
“I saw this post a few years ago and agreed wholeheartedly with the issues and cost of Fivetran but I also understood that not many data teams have the bandwidth to manage ingestion from scratch on top of, or rather underneath, the data modeling effort.”
“All the product bells and whistles of Fivetran: speed, compliance, api/cli, security and enterprise procurement stuff. sans the marketing and the pricing model. Tell them I sent you, maybe they'll give you something extra :-)”
“We originally reached out for a custom build to load a zip file sent from a vendor’s API and while doing some validation and setup with Ethan we started moving more and more off fivetran to then, and then worked with them to build a connector for our D365 ERP system.”
“Fivetran, when they first started, was definitely a no-brainer. It helped a lot of companies get up and running with full data stacks by letting you:”
“I have several clients that have made the switch from Fivetran to Portable. Apart from pricing, the major differentiator my customers talk about is the level of service (often directly from Ethan the founder) and attention they get.”
“They've scaled connector count and rolled pricing into volume based tiers, which reads less like a real cost driver and more like a proxy for how much a company will pay once they're locked in. Matillion and the rest of the category have mostly converged on the same 150 or so greatest hits sources too, so differentiation across the space has flattened out.”
“I moved off Fivetran very recently, putting the majority of my connectors onto Portable. I'm not using BigQuery, but I've been very happy with the level of service and overall reliability of the tool.”
“Haven’t used portable but have used fivetran and don’t love it. We’ve actually been piloting Estuary which has been pretty nice to use but tbd if we will use it long term.”
“fivetran at that scale will eat your budget without warning. i spent years managing lean teams, and if you want to keep the workflow in sql, put Altimate AI on the task for your custom connectors.”
“Fivetran has no historical data (had a business negotiation with them 2 years ago for social media connectors (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter). If the API connection fails you can't backfill and you lose data.”
“Fivetran adjusted their pricing strategy this year (full resyncs now cost the full price), making it very expensive for scenarios where you occasionally need to bulk-change data.”
“Start with your core sources on dlt, if it’s too hard / fragile, use fivetran. But in these days with Claude, you can debug most issues easily and dlt has great support.”
“As some other folks have mentioned, dlt + Claude should get you pretty far for sources that don't have support in the managed solutions like Estuary/Fivetran/Airbyte etc.”
“If you go to the Fivetran pricing page it doesn’t mention the free tier being a trial. So they’re advertising a free trial as a free tier. It’s scummy.”
“Fivetran can be worth it if the pre-built connectors save you a lot of engineering time and maintenance, especially with ad platform APIs changing or behaving inconsistently. But I wouldn’t think of it as a full replacement for pipeline observability.”
“Fivetran's value proposition is you pay and in a few clicks data is moving. Generally I find if people can afford it they find it reliable as it is one less thing to worry about. But it's not just connectors, it's infrastructure, support and so on.”