“If most of the work is standardized ingestion from ad APIs, Fivetran shines. If you expect highly custom workflows and internal tooling, Airflow may age better long term”
“fivetran can save a lot of build time, but i’d run it on your ugliest source first before committing. especially if these pipelines are becoming core product, not just BI.”
“It's significantly cheaper to use compared to fivetran (we're talking a few hundred bucks a year), though it requires more setup from you compared to clicking through oauth flows like fivetran. With an orchestrator and a little compute you're good to go.”
“Fivetran pricing is kind of a dealbreaker for me personally, but I understand it's considered top of the line. FWIW we adopted Airbyte 1 year ago and it has been great.”
“Fivetran is reliable and it works (fast) and it's flexible enough to connect between databases or APIs or block storage or even email-to-db BUT it has gotten ridiculously expensive in the past 1-2 years.”
“Am i correct that the main benefit for choosing fivetran in this situation (which will cost 3-4x as much) is the pre-built connectors? Or is there more to fivetran than I understand?”
“Yeah the per connector pricing hit a lot of teams hard. Feels like they're betting on switching costs being too painful for customers to leave. We started evaluating alternatives after the March changes.”
“Nothing about this means tools like Fivetran+dbt are suddenly open source. The idea is that they operate on top of infrastructure that is less restrictive than the old warehouse model - there’s so much to unpack tho in terms of current technological developments and what future data platform will look like.”
“Because they typically price on monthly deltas volumes there’s kind of a middle tier where it makes sense as part of your tech stack. Too low and it’s too expensive, and if your data volumes are massive, again, too expensive. But if you’re in that sweet spot, it may be worth paying a vendor than paying an engineer to perform those tasks.”
“All that said, my Fivetran and dbt Cloud bill is much higher than my Snowflake bill so I'm not worried about the compute layer like they seem to think companies are.”
“OpenFlow for all things on-prem SQL Server which is 90% of what we are replicating. We will likely leave the other connectors on Fivetran until OpenFlow has connectors or we find another vendor that would make it easy to switch to.”
“My suggestion would be dlt. It's open source, but dlthub, the company behind it, is building something on top of it, not just a dlt SasS, so I am pretty confident it will stay open.”
“We also use DBT and have been using the transformations inside of fivetran so they want to entertain the idea of finding something similar (probably not possible I told them)”
“We offer hundreds of connectors, and the AI makes it dead simple to start immediately building out analyses or dashboards.A bit about what’s going on under the hood:- We use Fivetran to connects to data sources (we tested at a number of different ETL solutions and Fivetran really stood out)”
“Are you personally planning to fork SQLMesh and spend a substantial chunk of your time maintaining it, if Fivetran strip the original for parts? Perhaps you will fund this via a hosted version - will you be picking up the phone to pitch it to companies yourself, or will you use your own money to pay someone to do that?”
“I think they're going to move into the compute layer and offer the ability to run your dbt transformations using Fivetran compute (likely powered by DuckDB) at the same price or cheaper than you'd get with Snowflake/Databricks/BQ.”
“Fivetran is great for fully managed, low-maintenance pipelines; Airbyte offers flexibility and open-source customization; DLT is promising for more modular, developer-centric workflows.”
“With 80-90% customer overlap and pricing already strained (users report 4-8x cost increases under Fivetran's recent pricing changes), expect layoffs and further price optimization as the merged company eliminates redundancies.”
“(2) Fivetran is over-priced - Although I do think that Fivetran is an industry-leading product, it is also highly over-priced. It seems inevitable that this commercial strategy will eventually extend to SQLMesh and dbt.”
“Just like Plaid's approach became the standard to code against in accessing financial services, Fivetran has become the default in getting data out of tools you already pay for directly into a controlled space.If they don't muck that up, they've got an embed in every large integration.”
“Fivetran is making money hand over fist on ingestion. Together, dbt adoption can drive revenue growth without dbt itself being monetized as orgs default more to using Fivetran to load data because it "just works" with dbt and expand to new sources because they're able to actually use more data efficiently”
“It feels like betting on the wrong horse, fivetran is pricing itself out of a market. I've been on two projects where we setup custom ingestion pipelines to save money on fivetran, and we expect to make the salary spend back within a year.”
“Fivetran is convenient but absurdly expensive. Now dbt core development is just another marketing cost for Fivetran.I'd really love to see everyone move on from the "modern data stack".”
“Fivetran acquired Census (reverse-etl) & Tobiko (dbt alternative).I wonder who's next to really consolidate their platform play and compete with the old legacy MDM provider like Informatica.”
“It makes sense with Fivetran and dbt being so complimentary, ingestion (Fivetran) vs transformation (DBT).But I still feel like I'm missing, in DBT, capabilities for DB DDL/DML deployment (which I've done from Liquibase in DBT) for a fully CICD modern data stack.”