“We've been seeing many customers switch over from Fivetran, with an average cost savings of around 50%. In addition to the savings, they often find more control over their data pipelines.”
“Fivetran was great for our "get up and going" and has served us well, but yes... their pricing model stings sometimes, especially when doing full backfills on production tables with new columns.”
“i would look into [stitch](https://www.stitchdata.com/) i’ve used it before to as an alternative to fivetran.. it’s slightly less expensive, but completely depends on the use case.”
“Opaque data loading process: This is fine for smaller jobs, but I have had a table with gigabytes of data, and the load part ran for seven days without visibility of how long it would take. Their customer support didn't know either.”
“If that's the case we will have to give our entire operating margin (>10 billion ) to Fivetran. It's probably that much for a million rows or something”
“As a small company, Fivetran is a huge time saver in allowing us to get data where it needs to go fast and 98% of the time I love it. The other 2% I'm wading into a sea of failures, warnings, and alerts that don't provide enough detail.”
“Because of those dependencies, the sync failed, the tables look like hell with deprecated columns scattered about, PK indexes on those columns dropped, and queries performing like hot garbage.”
“Fivetran charges by "monthly active rows", which quickly adds up when you have hundreds of millions to billions of rows that are constantly changing.https://fivetran.com/docs/usage-based-pricing”
“We use fivetran, dbt and snowflake and I don't really see a reason to have an orchestration tool. Fivetran and dbt do a great job of orchestration on their own in my opinion.”
“Fivetran can integrate with DBT Core directly to schedule model runs after the connector refreshes. Managed it as a team of one at my last startup to Snowflake - pricey but worthwhile for us due to the ease”
“Just load your data using Fivetran into their S3 destination connector that adds an iceberg/delta metadata layer on top. It’s pretty performant and pretty cheap. They’ll manage that raw layer and then use whatever service you want on top”
“Snowflake also have a connector to GA4 (aggregated, not raw) which will use the same GA4 APIs as Fivetran. This may be worth a try as well in case it is a quirk of Fivetran causing your issues.”
“From what I've seen, there's no page title available at all within any of the tables from Fivetran's connector, and I can't get any of the data to align with what we see in GA4.”
“The particular pull for Airbyte is that we can self-host the open source version, rather than pay Fivetran a significant sum to do this for us.It's an immature tool, so I don't yet know that I can claim we've spent _less_ than Fivetran on the additional engineering and ops time, but it feels like it has potential to do so once stabilized.”
“If you are a small team or maybe a single engineer I can see the benefit of using a tool like Fivetran but it’s not without trade offs. Just be aware of those trade offs.”
“The product is expensive, the billing model is dumb, the UI is shitty (and slow!!), we've received random email alerts about connectors being "delayed" by days when they weren't, you can't pick the actual times a sync will happen, the list goes on.”
“This entire paradigm is literally shit: Some data replication tool that upper management love + dbt (a tool that somehow basically managed to sell to VCs the need for using CTEs and removing DDL statements from SQL).”
“Like the OP, I too have been frustrated by the slow Fivetran response to support tickets and have had issues with ZenDesk specifically where we can't tell if it is our ZenDesk config or Fivetran's logic to pull data.”
“For a contrasting view: I’ve had good experience with Fivetran. Been using it for a few years. It proved really good for our use case: lot of different sources (oracle, sql server, Postgres, MySQL, SFDC, Jira, etc.). Creating each of these by hand would’ve taken us forever - we were replicating thousands of tables.”
“I struggle to see how you can say it is cheaper to develop, deploy and maintain your own framework for use cases like mine. We still use self hosted meltano for other connections which are high volume, but I think Fivetran is a decent tool which has it's place for a lot of organisations.”
“Started using fivetran and seeing the cost go up but for now the benefit outweighs the cost. I was able to deliver value back to the business by getting the data that they want much faster compared to developing it myself.”
“Fivetran's pricing reflects this. They allow small companies free to get started and once they've scaled they get put on a higher priced plan that actually generates revenue vs. eating sales and CS cycles giving demos to low price point companies that will potentially never generate significant revenue for them.”
“But a big part of why companies like Fivetran exist is because so many SaaS vendors have shitty, unreliable, buggy and poorly documented APIs. And I'm kinda sick and tired of perpetuating the cycle.”