Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Snaplogic is unique from other IPASS tools if you're very sensitive about data security as they have an on-premise option where your data never needs to leave your data center. And data pipelines can be quickly created if Snaplogic has the requisite connector to your data sources. On the downside, if you're transforming a large amount of data for example in training machine learning models, a tool with elastic compute capability is more appropriate.
Read full review Pros 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 Read full review Easy access to any type of source system. Data could be in any format. Very beautiful visual representation of transforms that makes it super easy to use it by any non developer. It can be run in cloud or on-premise. helping you choose your comfort of security. Has pretty good customer support and have recently started their community forum as well. Read full review Cons 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 Read full review They need to have a way to connect to GitHub to allow the users to maintain their version control in GitHub. This is a missing functionality. As pipelines become complex, it's difficult to have all the snaps stitched together - just like to see it done differently. They do not have a way to start/stop a preview. This is hard to use, especially if you have to stop an accidental preview invocation. Read full review Likelihood to Renew This has been hands down the BEST software company I have ever used and dealt with. I am a 25 year IT veteran at this college. They go above and beyond in soliciting our feedback/input and proactively follow up about bugs, issues, etc. I have given multiple potential clients my thoughts and after seeing the SL demo they all sign up. I appreciate their support model, it's REFRESHING!
Read full review Usability It is very powerful but has a steep learning curve
Read full review Support Rating They can be prompt but they have not been as useful as I've wanted. We had a bug that affected many of our customers through an API connection between SnapLogic and our platform. Eventually they were able to figure it out, but it took a long time of negotiating between our engineering team and theirs. Additionally, we installed the SnapLogic groundplex for our customers and we've run into a bunch of problems of connectivity. If SnapLogic offered to be on those calls with our clients to troubleshoot how to fix these problems, I would give them a better grade here.
Read full review Implementation Rating The groundplex in our VPC is very nice for security reasons and the SnapLogic team was extremely helpful during our implementation
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We opted for SnapLogic due its ease of use and the flexibility it offers, it was the platform that was strongest in both application integration and data integration and both were use cases we wanted to be able to cover.
Read full review Return on Investment Simplified our BI layer for faster load times Increased the quality of data reaching our end users Makes complex transformations manageable Read full review We have cut development time down by at least 70% The software was more on the expensive side at renewal which required some further approvals to be sought for the spend More developers are able to build and use Snaplogic pipelines in their projects Read full review ScreenShots