Item: Matillion
Rating: 8
Author: Steve Bramblet

Overall Satisfaction with Matillion

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Matillion is the primary ETL tool in our business. We use it daily to build data pipelines for facilitating client dashboards which are hosted in our online platform.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Drag and drop interface
Built in 3rd party connectors
Leverage power of python

Cons

Cloud data platform migration not straightforward
AI still immature
Server version licensing is expensive

Return on Investment

Positive, we can add engineers and they can quickly get up to speed
Negative, server license cost is per uptime meaning we carefully manage uptime and cannot leave it running all night long

Although no code, we do end up writing a lot of python / sql in our pipelines just for convenience and power's sake. Not all the built-in components can do everything we need them to do.
But for clarity, we are all experienced engineers so writing code is sometimes easier then building visual pipelines with lots of components.
Some of the juniors will use the toolbox vs writing code and I know it's easy for them.

Time to Value

We switched to Matillion shortly after I began working at my current role. It probably took a week to get up and running? For moderately experienced engineers they can build / maintain existing pipelines with a couple days tooling around to get familiar.

Scalability

It's generally good for what it does. We have yet to find a datasource we cannot connect to. Although often we will use a custom API query component or python in the more obscure / difficult cases. Fortunately Matillion has a very good API query component that is a bit daunting to learn if it needs to be custom but once figured out it can really do a lot. Otherwise we use python which is very popular and common amongst most devs.

Alternatives Considered

SQL Server Integration Services

The only other ETL tool I've used was SSIS. At first I thought Matillion seemed "kiddish" after using the polished Microsoft tool but now I think Matillion is easier and can do much more as it has so many built-in connectors etc. We selected Matillion at our job because of ease of use and how it integrated with Snowflake which is our chosen data warehouse.

Key Insights

Do you think Matillion delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Matillion's feature set?

Yes

Did Matillion live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Matillion go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Matillion again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Snowflake, Tableau Server

Likelihood to Recommend

Quick and dirty pipelines easy to build even without knowing the GUI. Can easily build components using python. API Query component (server version) is flexible although discontinued in Cloud version (unfortunately!)

Matillion Feature Ratings

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