Alooma vs. Cloud Elements (discontinued)

Very appropriate for managing an ELT stack -- Alooma handles the 'E' and 'L' pieces very well. Due to the way transformation is setup, it is more on the lightweight side of things and thus works for this kind of stack. For more traditional ETL stacks, Alooma would probably not be the right fit.

Incentivized

Areas where it would be appropriate:

1. If you want a really 'deep' integration with a third party software, and you want all the control over how it interacts with your software
2. If you want a totally white-labeled solution, that is totally invisible to your customers.
3. if you care more about a well thought out/useful API, rather than a pretty UI

Areas where it is less appropriate:

1. If you want a Zapier-esque hands-off integration for YOU.
2. if you want your customers to do more of the work, pay for it/etc.
3. if you're a really small business, it could be too expensive. But it depends on your individual contract with them.

Incentivized

• Transformation of data before entering the data warehouse -- allows for a consistent/understandable schema for analytics teams.
• Adding of additional data sources: Alooma has a large library of pre-built, common 3rd party vendors for which data is often needed to be ETL-ed.

Incentivized

• Customer Support -- They have a knowledgeable team and are very responsive.
• Communication -- Most questions are addressed quickly
• Documentation -- The API documentation is well organized and easy to follow.

Incentivized

• More tools on managing the data warehouse itself. Although great on the ingest and transformation of data, more help provided by the tool on managing the outputs would be welcome.
• Increase possibilities in the transformation step, rather than single event transformations.

Incentivized

• There weren't really many cons to our experience. The only slight downside was the cost but they worked with us on that to make it work.

Incentivized

Haven't used the alternatives, since Alooma was one of the earlier ones to the market. From a cursory viewing, however, the features seem to match relatively similarly.

Incentivized

MuleSoft is also a similar product to Cloud Elements, but is not available as an option in this form.

Workato and MuleSoft are competing cloud API connector platforms that perform a similar function to Cloud Elements. We chose Cloud Elements over them because CE provided a more robust path to unifying the behavior of connected systems.

Zapier is a workflow automation tool that I feel draws erroneous comparison to Cloud Elements that I need to highlight. Workflow automation tools (Zapier, IFTTT, Microsoft Flow) do provide multiple integrations, but for simplistic scenarios where only a handful of explicitly described steps need accomplished. Cloud Elements is a platform for developers to deliver faster and with higher reliability than making integrations one-by-one in complex systems that solve demanding problems.

Incentivized

• Allowing for additional data sources to more automation capability around monitoring the business is a huge ROI

Incentivized

• We are able to build integrations in HALF the time we could build them from scratch.
• They allow our development team to spend more hours focused on developing our core product, not connections to other products.
• Their large catalog of services to connect to allows us to spend much less time researching other platform integration endpoints and increases our R&D speed a considerable amount.

Incentivized