5 Best Tools to Replace Fivetran [Comparative Table Inside]

How do you currently process and analyze your marketing data? Whether using Fivetran to work on your insights or researching alternatives, we’ve got you covered.

Our team has compiled this guide to share our perspective on Fivetran’s strengths and weaknesses, and to help you understand how Fivetran alternatives can help you get the most out of your data. Here’s our short list of the most prominent Fivetran alternatives:

Improvado.io: A no-code marketing analytics solution designed for large enterprises and agencies. Ready to automate data management tasks? Start improving your reporting today with full-fledged support from an Improvado expert.

Stitch: A multi-purpose ETL tool with data sourcing ranging from GitHub to Salesforce Desk.
Adverity: A data integration and visualization platform for marketers with experience processing and using data.
Marketing Cloud Intelligence (formerly Datorama): A cloud intelligence platform with solid visualization capabilities for marketers familiar with SQL.
Google Cloud Datastream (formerly Alooma): A data pipeline as a service that allows for marketing data extraction, data mapping, and querying data.

Fivetran Overview

Fivetran is a cloud-based data integration platform that helps centralize data in a single repository.

Fivetran is a low-code, cloud-based extract, transform, load (ETL) solution for different business domains with basic technical skills. The tool enables teams to synchronize and replicate data from 160+ data sources into their respective cloud data warehouses and prepare it for further visualization and analysis.

Fivetran offers advanced, in-destination transformation features, including integrated scheduling, triggered transformations, version control, and more. The company continues to support basic SQL transformations but advises its clients to switch to Transformations for dbt Core, available in beta. Both transformation options require engineering resources and strong SQL knowledge.

Fivetran Use Cases

The Fivetran learning curve and features suggest it is a niche platform and might not be ideal for all data teams. Fivetran is more suited to businesses with low-volume data incorporation needs. Since the platform lacks an SQL workbench, new users can find the UI rather clunky.

When choosing Fivetran, make sure the platform offers your most-needed data sources. The platform supports around 160 integrations and doesn’t provide custom APIs on request. Instead, Fivetran customers send connector requests and upvote existing requests for the team to prioritize their deployment. Another option is to code a custom data connector or a so-called “Function” connector. The task isn’t easy to complete. As the Fivetran documentation states: “Building a custom data pipeline from scratch is complicated. It’s even harder to maintain.”

Besides, Fivetran can be integrated into client software as an embedded data pipeline.

Fivetran Pricing

Unlike many other ETL solutions, Fivetran pricing features a row-based price model. Essentially, this means that usage determines the price you pay. The three current pricing options include:

Starter, starting at $120/month
Standard Select - $60/month
Enterprise - $240/month
Plus, there are “Business Critical” custom pricing plans.

Does it Make Fivetran Expensive?

Since there are no fixed rates for Fivetran, its pricing model can be complex. Depending on your monthly usage, it can be relatively expensive. Organizations often prefer platforms with more straightforward pricing for budgeting purposes.

Fivetran Integrations

It’s important to note that Fivetran only supports the ETL data integration pattern. This means that all the transfer processing only occurs through pushdown queries, as defined in DBT or SQL packages. For organizations that require integration patterns such as data preparation, ETL or data science pipelines, Fivetran might not be the best option.

Note: Fivetran isn't an industry-specific ETL tool. Regarding marketing and sales needs, it supports only 40+ data sources and may not provide a holistic picture of all your revenue-targeted activities. At the same time, Fivetran doesn't offer custom connectors on request. Customers can either send a connector request or develop a custom connector themselves, which is hard to do and maintain.

On top of it, the number of data transformation options is limited. To run a transformation on Fivetran, a team requires engineering resources and SQL knowledge.

Improvado frees marketers from data hassle and lets them do marketing. It's a no-code solution that automates every step in the ETL process and marketing reporting and is easy to master. Book a consultation with a company representative to see the platform in action.

Best Fivetran Alternatives

The good news is that if Fivetran doesn’t meet your company’s data-integration needs, there are several alternatives to consider. Read on as we delve into the most popular Fivetran alternatives and competitors.

Improvado

mprovado is an automated marketing analytics solution built for enterprise and mid-market brands and agencies.

What is Improvado?

Improvado is a no-code, enterprise-grade ETL solution that collects and automates your marketing, sales, and revenue data in one location. It synchronizes the data, applies advanced transformation, visualizes or sends it through to your chosen BI tools. The Improvado solution pulls data from 500+ data sources and provides pre-built extraction templates to run bulk campaign extractions. If the platform doesn’t have a connector a client needs, the team builds custom connectors.

Improvado is flexible in the frequency of data extraction and provides a scheduled reporting update feature and the functionality to sync data anytime. The platform offers an advanced data transformation framework called Marketing Common Data Model (MCDM). It lets customers automatically standardize metrics, run automated data mapping, and run transformations using self-service or out-of-the-box recipes.

When the data is ready for analysis, Improvado clients can either push it to the BI tool of their choice or use Improvado’s marketing dashboard.

Improvado Use Cases

Improvado is explicitly designed to meet sales, marketing, and revenue teams’ needs. With custom reports, dashboards, and a pricing plan that reflects your data usage, Improvado is a versatile option used by small and large organizations. The Improvado website features solutions targeted explicitly at enterprise-grade companies, mid-market brands, and marketing agencies operating in different industries.

Based on G2 information, Improvado customers come from the following industries:

Marketing and Advertising 68.9%
Hospital & Health Care 4.4%
Higher Education 4.4%
Food & Beverages 4.4%
Sporting Goods 2.2%
Other 15.6%

Improvado Pricing

Improvado doesn’t have any specific pricing tiers. The platform assesses your company’s business needs and calculates a custom plan best suited to your data team’s needs.

Schedule a 30-minute call with the Improvado representative to discuss your company's reporting needs and business objectives. That way, you get quoted and pay only for the amount of your data pipeline you offload and the number of data rows used.

Clients also get Data Extraction Customization Service (DECS) points, which they can use on adding custom connectors, new report types, metrics, and dimensions for existing and custom data sources, or flat-file ingestion.

Improvado Integrations

Currently, Improvado has over 500 integrations to help your company integrate the necessary data. However, if there’s a connector that you need that isn’t on the platform, Improvado’s custom feature can easily integrate the data source needed.

Pros	Cons
Kicking off the Improvado data pipeline is easy: the company supports bulk campaign extraction and provides pre-built extraction templates. Any newly connected data source is automatically loaded to the account.	Improvado is focused on marketing and sales needs; the company doesn’t support HR, finance, or other data sources.
Improvado provides flexible pricing that matches your needs and data usage.	Improvado doesn’t offer free trials, but potential clients can request Proof of Concept.
Improvado builds custom data sources for its clients and supports their needs with professional services. Teams with zero technical expertise can derive value from Improvado.

Stitch

What is Stitch?

As another popular Fivetran alternative, Stitch is primarily a developer-focused ETL solution. Stitch provides tools for advanced data transformation within the data warehouse and via external processing engines. To run transformations, a team can use SQL, Python, Java, or a graphical UI.

Stitch Use Cases

Since the Stitch platform is a simple but extensible ETL, it’s a firm favorite of comprehensive data teams. Data extraction happens from multiple sources and is easily loaded into your designated data warehouses.

Despite this, Stitch isn’t the option of choice for data teams who want to customize their data migration. To derive maximum value from the tool, the client also needs to have extensive technical knowledge since Stitch doesn’t provide professional services.

Stitch Pricing

As with Fivetran, Stitch pricing depends on your monthly usage. It also has a 14-day unlimited trial available for first-time users. Its plans include the following:

Standard plans: Starts at $100 per month and provides access to 100+ sources and allows five users per account
Enterprise plans: Custom per account based on user needs. It features post-load webhooks, API key management, HIPAA support and access from multiple destinations.

Stitch integrations

When it comes to Stitch vs. Fivetran integrations, it’s worth noting that Stitch supports over 100 SaaS database integrations. It focuses on general business connectors, including HR, ERP, finance, accounting, and marketing.

Pros	Cons
Stitch offers an unlimited 14-day free trial.	Stitch offers 100+ connectors in total, and when it comes to marketing and sales, it’s unable to provide a granular picture of all marketing and sales activities.
The platform offers flexible pricing that depends on the client’s needs.	Advanced data transformations require the knowledge of SQL, Python or Java. Teams with zero technical expertise will struggle to use Stitch.
Stitch focuses on general data sources, making it a versatile data tool.

Adverity

What is Adverity

Adverity is another popular Fivetran alternative that offers a wide ETL functionality that can be applied across industries, including marketing, eCommerce, CPG and retail, telecoms, tech, and media and entertainment. Adverity offers advanced features, like data mapping, naming convention harmonization, and data unification from multiple data streams. Most data enrichment features, as they are called by Adverity, must be done with significant manual input and writing scripts.

Adverity Use Cases

Adverity is versatile in that it’s used by any type of organization, from startups to enterprise organizations, regardless of whether they have the technical expertise or not. Adverity also has AI-powered features that enable clients to identify data patterns and insights.

Adverity Pricing

Adverity’s pricing tiers are comprised of a QuickStart plan that companies can try for free. Its Premium plan starts from $1,500 per month, while the Enterprise plan is customized to your business needs.

Pricing for the Adverity platform is calculated based on a few factors, including:

Data volume
Required connectors
Data destinations
User access

Adverity Integrations

The Adverity platform features over 600 data integration connectors, meaning it can cover all analytics needs right out of the box.

Note: Adverity has a steep learning curve and is hard to navigate for first-time users.

Data transformation, or data enrichment, scripts and other advanced features require some experience with the product and Python knowledge. Adverity offers limited professional services, which can be an issue for teams lacking technical expertise.

Go for a solution that can grow from a vendor to a full-on marketing analytics partner. The Improvado Professional Services team assists with dashboard customization and technical issues like custom data sources connection, flat-file feed, and custom data transformations.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence (formerly Datorama)

Marketing Cloud Intelligence (ex. Datorama) is a cloud-based marketing analytics and reporting platform.

What is Marketing Cloud Intelligence?

Aside from being a data integration tool, Marketing Cloud Intelligence (formerly known as Datorama) is a platform that specializes in high-end business intelligence and analytics. Additionally, the platform aims to help data teams merge data from multiple locations to a single, easy-to-access destination. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence offers features to pull data from numerous sources, harmonize it, and visualize or push it to a data visualization tool. In doing so, teams can access a broader scope of its data processing system.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence Use Cases

Ideally, Marketing Cloud Intelligence is better suited to technical marketing teams who utilize engineering resources to get the most out of their data integration. As a more technical platform, organizations that are opting for this program must have competent teams on board. Implementation engineers or IT experts specializing in coding are often required.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence Pricing

Marketing Cloud Intelligence is currently available in the three pricing tiers, as outlined below:

Starter: $3000 per month – billed annually
Growth: $10,000 per month – billed annually
Plus: Price available based on company requirements

Marketing Cloud Intelligence Integrations

Marketing Cloud Intelligence offers around 170 data sources, including 123 for integrating with marketing vendors. This number of data sources may not provide the necessary analysis granularity in comparison to its competitors.

The biggest drawback of Datorama is vendor lock, meaning you can't load data from Datorama to your in-house storage or merge it with third-party insights. All the data you extract with Datorama stays in Datorama. You can't share it outside the platform or load it elsewhere if you decide to migrate from Datorama.

The vendor lock-in makes your team dependent on the tool and vulnerable to all the changes. When choosing a marketing analytics platform, the number one rule would be to go for the solution that gives you full control of your data.

With Improvado, your data can be loaded either to your cloud warehouse or Improvado's environment. And if you don't have your own data warehouse or expertise to manage one, Improvado offers data warehouse management services.

Google Cloud Datastream (formerly Alooma)

What is Google Cloud Datastream?

Datastream is primarily a data pipeline. It allows data teams to easily have more visibility and control over their data as it’s extracted from various data platforms. A significant factor is that the platform can stream data by integrating with various data sources, which include marketing services, transactional databases, SDKs, and sales points.

Datastream Use Cases

Since Google acquired Datastream (formerly Alooma) in 2019, there has been a considerable amount of speculation that the platform will withdraw support for cloud-based warehouse alternatives. This means it will only support its current option, which is BigQuery.

That said, only organizations not currently using the BigQuery data warehouse might not find Datastream a viable option. Especially since migrating data from an existing cloud warehouse to another can be both costly and impractical. This makes Datastream an improbable option for many organizations.

Alooma Pricing

As with other Fivetran alternatives, Datastream offers a free trial but no free plan. It also doesn’t have a pre-determined pricing schedule. Rather, pricing is customized to match your company’s data requirements. On average, pricing ranges between $1,000 to $15,000 per month.

Datastream Integrations

Some users have found that the Datastream platform’s data integrations are limited since it only offers about 40 integrations natively. Other sources will require Webhooks and REST API connectors to be used.

Final Thought

Depending on your organization’s data integration needs, technical expertise, and data sources required, there’s a Fivetran alternative for you. By considering each alternative, you’ll easily find the option that will provide your organization with the most effective data aggregation possible.