Alooma vs Matillion

Alooma and Matillion provide data integration capabilities for businesses. Alooma, which was purchased by Google in 2019, provides a more comprehensive platform for integrating applications and systems, as well as data flows, while Matillion specializes as a point solution for data Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL). 

Alooma is an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), which entails an architectural foundation  for connecting applications and datastreams, in this case with a specialization in integrating data sources with Google’s BigQuery data warehouse. Matillion focuses on extracting data from an original source, or many original sources, formatting the data for the end user, and storing it in a data warehouse.  

Features 

Alooma and Matillion both have strong features tailored to their corresponding use cases.

Alooma provides features that span a wide range of data integration needs. In particular, Alooma offers mature data mapping capabilities, which grants flexibility when dataflows change and enable non-IT users. It also specializes in loading data into Google’s BigQuery data warehouse.

Matillion’s specialization as an ETL solution allows it to excel in this capacity. Users point to Matillion’s ability to transform data from a wide range of platforms and cloud-based environments. In particular, the product is ideal for integrating AWS applications and data warehouses. 

Limitations 

While both products have tailored strengths, each also has tradeoffs and limitations in their offerings. 

While Alooma’s transformation and broader ETL capabilities are reliable, they can be overly simplistic. Some users have experienced limitations in the platform’s single-step transformation flow. Since it’s purchase by Google, it is also more limited outside of feeding data to Google’s BigQuery data warehouse. 

In contrast, while Matillion specializes in cloud-based ETL into data warehouses, it may be more limited beyond this use case. It lacks some mapping features for non-IT users, and may not offer the same security features for more complex integrations beyond ETL into data warehouses. Some organizations may experience difficulties scaling their instances of the tool as well. 

Pricing

Alooma provides limited pricing information, and exact figures are available by quote from the vendor. Some dated figures place average pricing between $1,000-$1,500 per month to use the service. 

Matillion provides four packages for its ETL capabilities, priced per hour of usage. The “Medium” package, at $1.27/hr, provides 2 users and 6 environments. The “Large” package, at $2.74/hr, supports 5 concurrent users and 15 environments and clustering. The “XLarge” package, at $5.48/hr, supports 12 concurrent users and 35 environments. Enterprise package pricing is available by quote from the vendor.