dbt vs. Stitch from Talend

If you can load your data first into your warehouse, dbt is excellent. It does the T(ransformation) part of ELT brilliantly but does not do the E(xtract) or L(oad) part. If you know SQL or your development team knows SQL, it's a framework and extension around that. So, it's easy to learn and easy to hire people with that technical skill (as opposed to specific Informatica, SnapLogic, etc. experience). dbt uses plain text files and integrates with GitHub. You can easily see the changes made between versions. In GUI-based UIs it was always hard to tell what someone had changed. Each "model" is essentially a "SELECT" statement. You never need to do a "CREATE TABLE" or "CREATE VIEW" - it's all done for you, leaving you to work on the business logic. Instead of saying "FROM specific_db.schema.table" you indicate "FROM ref('my_other_model')". It creates an internal dependency diagram you can view in a DAG. When you deploy, the dependencies work like magic in your various environments. They also have great documentation, an active slack community, training, and support. I like the enhancements they have been making and I believe they are headed in a good direction.

Incentivized

Stitch is very cheap and useful for small to medium size companies to ingest data from common apis/platforms in a quick and cheap way.

Incentivized

• user experience makes it easy to work with SQL and version control
• customer success team and the dbt (data build tool) community help establish best practices
• thorough and clear documentation

• Easy integration with many sources
• Extensible
• Not as expensive as fivetran

Incentivized

• Slow load times of the dbt cloud environment (they're working on it via a new UI though)
• More out-of-the-box solutions for managing procedures, functions, etc would be nice to have, but honestly, it's pretty easy to figure out how to adapt dbt macros

Incentivized

• Stitch is not good at replicating document stores like MongoDB to relational databases. To be fair, this is a difficult task. Stitch flattens the objects, but the result is unwieldy.
• Stitch cannot replicate the same source to multiple sinks, which is inconvenient if you want to replicate some of a datastore's tables to Redshift and others to Redshift Spectrum, for instance.

Incentivized

Most ETL pipeline products have a T layer, but dbt just does it better. The transformation is on steroids compared to the others. Also, just allows much more Adhoc solutions for very specific projects. Those ETL tools are probably better on the T part if you don't need too many transforms - also dbt is pretty much free dependent on how you work it, also extremely scalable.

Incentivized

Stitch from Talend is way more cost effective and has a business model that better aligns with our company. From what I can tell Stitch from Talend has a better customer support platform as well and has been very easy to work with when issues have come up. They also seem less pushy when it comes to sales.

Incentivized

• Simplified our BI layer for faster load times
• Increased the quality of data reaching our end users
• Makes complex transformations manageable

Incentivized

• Good ROI in terms of being able to monitor cost performance from Google, Facebook, etc.
• Easy to have Salesforce data and Intercom data for dashboards.

Incentivized