Fivetran vs. Google Cloud Dataflow

Fivetran's business model justifies the use-case where we require data from a single source basically a lot of data but if the requirement is not on the heavier side, Fivetran comes to costly operation when compared to its peers. Otherwise, I'll recommend Fivetran for stability and update and seamless service provider.

Incentivized

It is best in cases where you have batch as well as streaming data. Also in some cases where you have batch data right now and in future you will get streaming data. In those cases Dataflow is very good. Also in cases where most of your infra is on GCP. It might not be good when you already are on AWS or Azure. And also you want in-depth control over security and management. Then you can directly use Apache beam over Dataflow.

Incentivized

• Easily connects to source data using delivered connectors
• Transforms data into standard models and schemas
• Has very good documentation to help quickly setup connectors

Incentivized

• Streaming, Real time work load
• Batch processing
• Auto scaling
• flexible pricing

• Very difficult to get connectors enhanced if a specific needed object is not supported by them
• Depending on the edition needed and the data volumes, can get quite expensive

Incentivized

• More templates for Bigquery and App Engine. There is only limited options for templates so the things we use can limit.
• I would like native connectors for Excel (XLSX) to reduce the need for custom wrappers in financial pipelines.
• Debugging Google Cloud Dataflow using only logs in Cloud Logging can be overwhelming sometimes, and it’s not always obvious which specific element in the flow caused a failure. IT uses a lot of time.

Incentivized

Very easy and intuitive to setup and maintain as there usually are not that many options. Very well documented (e.g. how to setup each connector, how the schema looks like, any specific features of this connector etc.). Also the operation is intuitive, e.g. you have status pages, log pages, configuration pages etc. for each connector.

Incentivized

It really saved a lot of time and it's flexibility really can give you infra which is future-proof for most of the use cases may it be streaming or batch data. And with this you can avoid use of resource-heavy big data offerings.

Incentivized

It runs pretty well and gets our data from point A to point cluster quickly enough. Honestly, it's not something I think about unless it breaks and that's pretty rare.

Incentivized

We never seriously considered using anything else. Our data engineers had used Fivetran extensively in previous roles so when it came time to make a decision, there wasn't much of a process. They gladly signed the contract with Fivetran pretty quickly.

Incentivized

Google Cloud Dataproc Cloud Datafusion

• It has been very positive in serving BI team with new source requests
• It has been OK at scaling to match as data volumes as source data size grows

Incentivized

• cost saving from managing our own data center for ETL servers
• consumption based pricing
• with auto scaling feature, we were able to expand components to support work load