Fivetran Alternatives - Keboola is what you are looking for in 2023

1. Overview: What are Fivetran and Keboola used for?

Both Fivetran and Keboola are data platforms that are used to build and automate your ETL pipelines. 

Relying on an ETL platform for your data integrations has multiple advantages:

1. Saves you engineering hours, which you can use for more revenue-generating work.
2. Reduce costs by outsourcing the maintenance of the infrastructure of your ETL pipeline to the SaaS vendor.
3. Accelerate the decision-making process by bringing together data from different sources into a centralized repository.

Unlike its competitor Fivetran and other ETL-only tools, Keboola goes beyond data integrations. 

It is a data platform as a service, offering tools for data tasks beyond ETL, such as prototyping machine learning products, data governance, but more on this later.

2. Data sources

Keboola and Fivetran both allow you to extract data from multiple in-house and 3rd Party data sources.

Let’s see how the two contenders compare:

• Quantity: while Fivetran offers around 160 incoming data sources, Keboola’s number is approaching 300. 
• Data warehouses as sources: Keboola offers 20 data warehouses as sources, its alternative Fivetran only 10.
• Transparency and documentation. Fivetran integrations come with how-to guides, while Keboola builds open-source integrations as well as documentation, which allows you to better understand how an extractor works. As an example, look at the differences in documentation and access to code for Google Analytics integration: Fivetran’s implementation vs Keboola’s solution. 
• Origin of integrations. Fivetran does not support community-built integrations. What the Fivetran team builds is what you get. In contrast, its alternative Keboola offers rich community-built applications alongside their core integrations.

Choose from 250+ data sources and build your data flow using drag and drop in minutes. Try Keboola for free.

3. Custom sources

The most crucial difference between the two is what happens when you want to extract data from a source that is not yet covered by the officially provided connectors and extractors.

When you will require a custom connector, you are going to experience two drastically different scenarios with Keboola and its alternative, Fivetran.

Fivetran does not allow you to build your own custom data source extractors. If you want to add a new data source, you need to request it with Fivetran’s support (and wait for them to build it).

On the other hand, Keboola developed an open-source toolkit for building new connectors. 

Keboola offers a Generic component to import data from almost any REST API and countless other APIs. The component acts as a customizable HTTP REST client, so you can build your own data source. The universal extractor does not require programming prowess, you can write your extractor as a JSON.

4. Data transformations

Fivetran used to be extremely lacking with the transformation features they offered their clients. Then they partnered with dbt n order to extend their SQL transformation abilities. Unfortunately, Fivetran main focus remains on post-load transformations (you cannot clean data before data loading), and it is unclear how using dbt affects pricing.

Keboola, on the other hand, offers extensive pre-and post-load data transformations, as well as dbt transformations. You can either choose from premade components that do the transformation for you or fully customize transformations by writing the scripts yourself. 

And unlike its alternative Fivetran, you are not limited to SQL transformations. You can write custom transformations in the programming language your engineers and scientists love best (SQL, Python, R, Julia,…), and business users can tap into no-code transformations and build their own data pipelines using drag-and-drop functionalities.

5. Data destinations

Both platforms offer similar destinations for your data loading use cases and are rather comparable. Destinations they both offer are: 

• Databases: MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Firebird, Microsoft SQL Server, Neo4j, Oracle, …
• Cloud data warehouses: Apache Hive, Amazon Redshift, IBM dashDB, Snowflake, Synapse, Google BigQuery …
• Data lakes

6. Advanced analytics, data dashboards, and machine learning applications

Both Keboola and its alternative Fivetran offer integrations with all major big data analytics platforms and business intelligence solutions. What sets Keboola apart from its Fivetran alternative is the ecosystem of tooling built specifically for data engineering and data science:

1. Keboola’ Development branches build environments where your data scientists and engineers can prototype AI and ML products without breaking the underlying data pipelines. 
2. Keboola’s Data Catalog allows you to both document data as well as share data with all interested parties. Understanding the data you work with is crucial for building data products and trusting your data analysis.
3. Data scientists can tap into Keboola’s application marketplace to automate multiple aspects of their work. Among others, they can integrate Google’s NLP API into their workflow or deploy their ML model to Azure as an API with a couple of clicks. This removes bottlenecks where data practitioners had to rely on data engineers to set up the environment and pipelines needed for them to do their work.

7. Automation

Fivetran has some automation logic in the background, where you can set up the frequency of data syncing.

Unlike Keboola, which comes with a full-fledged automation environment. You can automate your data extraction, cleaning, loading, and even more bottom-of-the-funnel functions like data analysis, this way you are always working with fresh and relevant data. 

8. Security

Both platforms offer enterprise-grade security and compliance:

• From HIPAA, SOC 2, and GDPR certificates of regulatory compliance.
• Data encryption at rest and in transit.
• MFA and other forms of access provisioning.
• External security audits and certification renewals.

The difference is the amount of money you have to pay to tap into those security levels.

Fivetran offers safe VPN tunnels for data transfers only on their most expensive plan (if you pay less, you will have to SSH or find another solution). 

Keboola on the other hand does not think its paying customers are the only ones who need data protection. Your data is secure even on the freemium model.

9. Support 

Support is integral to deciding which data platform to deploy for your data needs. For sensible reasons. When things go wrong - not if, mind you, when - you have to know you can rely on your vendor to help you resolve your queries.

Keboola is praised for the support it offers its customers: users have consistently rated Keboola’s customer service with 5/5. 

The alternative, on the other hand, comes with a mixed bag of feedback. While some customers praise Fivetran for its customer support, others complain about inefficiencies, delays, and the necessary reliance on support for solving common problems.  

10. User satisfaction

Overall customer satisfaction is high on both platforms (4.7/5 - Keboola, 4.2/5 - Fivetran), which shows that choosing either product will help you speed up your data operations.

Ultimately, the choice will depend on the specific features you need and the cost/benefit analysis.

Here’s what users love about Keboola:

“What we find the most helpful is the system integrations that are already built in Keboola. It allows us to connect different tools quickly and effectively. Compared to the competition, many APIs and extractors are ready to do so.” Dávid U., Analytic Manager

“The good collection of extractors & writers, simplicity in building direct ETLs, and ease of setup the orchestrations. Keboola CS and support teams are super cooperative and friendly, also very responsive and helpful in solving and following up on issues” Mustafa T., Director of Big data and AI

11. Pricing model

The cost of tooling is an important aspect when deciding which data platform will serve your company’s needs best.

Both Keboola and its alternative, Fivetran, have the option to try the product for free. Fivetran offers a 14-day free trial, while Keboola has an always-free no questions asked plan. 

So, once the free aspect is over, how much do the platforms cost? Both data vendors charge proportionately to usage. 

Fivetran has a custom calculation of “monthly active rows” (MARs) and associated credits. You get charged for the number of rows that were inserted, deleted, or updated within a calendar month (aka Monthly Active Rows). However, it is a bit obscure how much that actually costs, because you need to convert MARs to credits and then credits to dollars.

With Keboola, you get free 300 minutes each month. After that, Keboola charges 14 cents per processing minute. 

Keboola is also designed to streamline and automate all your data operations, not just ETL. 

So instead of separately selecting, acquiring, configuring and integrating an endless list of technologies to build your data stack, Keboola can achieve the same result with just one platform. 

With Keboola you get:

• Enterprise data security for every business size
• Data governance and master data management
• DataOps (development branches and versioning, CDC to speed up operations, CLI)
• Data Catalog for data sharing
• Machine learning toolbox to build advanced AI projects

One tool, and one invoice will result in lower operational costs.

12. Other Fivetran alternatives 

Besides the tools mentioned below, we also recommend you check out our article 6 Best ETL Tools which overviews the best tools currently on the market, what are their pros, cons and who are they best fit for.

12.1. Stitch 

Stitch is an open-source data integration / ETL alternative that focuses on data extraction and loading data into a data warehouse or data lake. It was acquired by Talend and is integrated with many complementary paid and proprietary data services by Talend.

The main pros are its ease of use, and that the sources not covered by Stitch can still be extracted using the company’s extensibility network. 

Stitch will be a great Fivetran alternative for data engineers at a startup who need an easy-to-configure data integration software and do not expect complex data transformations. 

Recommended read: Learn how Stitch compares to Fivetran and Keboola.

12.2. Integrate.io (formerly Xplenty)

Integrate.io is a low-code ETL solution that allows you to integrate data flows into your apps and data warehousing solutions via APIs, webhooks, or natively within their cloud-based platform.

It can handle ETL, ELT and reverse ETL, however, you can expect a steep learning curve to learn how to use the product and all its features. Therefore, Integrate.io is ideal for tech-savvy daya engineers who need an easy-to-code ETL platform.

12.3. Hevo Data

Hevo Data is a no-code cloud-based ETL tool that also allows you to build all ETL, ELT and reverse ETL pipelines and covers a wide area of data sources you would typically find in a fast-growing startup.

It’s a no-code cloud-based ETL platform, making it great for business experts that do not know how to code.

12.4. Rivery 

Rivery is a SaaS low-code data integration tool that automates data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration. It offers hundreds of pre-built data connectors, however, setting up those integrations is complex and will require technical expertise.

Rivery will be most useful to teams who want to automate their data integration processes.

12.5. Matillion

Matillion ETL is a data integration platform that can build ETL data processes through a simple no-code/low-code drag-and-drop user interface (UI). 

The number and types of connectors covered by Matillion are extensive enough to cover the vast majority of use cases. This solution will be best suited for database engineers at startups, who want to build data models by integrating various data sources into the data warehouse.

12.6. Airbyte 

Airbyte is an ETL platform where you build your ETL data pipelines by linking the correct component blocks via a graphical dashboard that is intuitive and user-friendly.

It’s best for small businesses that have straightforward BI use cases. 

13. Choose Keboola and go beyond ETL

In the end, the choice for the best data tool will boil down to how that tool helps your data team solve their problems.

In this article, we compared side-by-side Keboola and its alternative Fivetran on the ETL features and other data operations functionalities.

Let’s recap he functionalities side-by-side:

While both platforms were built to automate ETL processes, only Keboola’s extensive data use cases go beyond ETL. 

Keboola takes Fivetran out of the park when it comes to: 

• Enterprise data security for every business size
• Data governance and master data management
• DataOps (development branches and versioning, CDC to speed up operations, CLI)
• Data Catalog for data sharing
• Machine learning toolbox to build advanced AI projects.

Keboola operates at the intersection of high performance and usability. 

It is designed to be used by both engineers and non-technical domain experts, by offering low-code and no-code solutions that automate the heavy lifting behind ETL processes.

Try it out for yourself!

Keboola offers a no-questions-asked, always-free trial (no credit card required), so you can play around and build your ETL pipelines with a couple of clicks.