Fivetran vs Improvado: Which Marketing Data Platform Is Right for Your Team? (2026)

Fivetran and Improvado both automate data extraction from marketing platforms to your warehouse. But they solve different problems. Fivetran is a generalist ELT tool designed for data teams managing hundreds of sources across domains — databases, SaaS apps, files. Improvado is purpose-built for marketing and advertising data, with pre-built transformations, field harmonization, and governance features that eliminate the engineering work between raw data and usable insights. This comparison breaks down where each platform wins, what they cost, and which team profile fits each tool.

A Note on Perspective

Full disclosure: we're Improvado, and this page reflects our perspective. We've worked to represent Fivetran's capabilities accurately based on public documentation, G2 reviews, and customer research. Where we've gotten something wrong, email us and we'll fix it. Our goal is to help you make the right call — even if that's not us.

Feature Comparison: Improvado vs Fivetran

Where Improvado and Fivetran Diverge

The platforms share a common foundation — automated data extraction from marketing sources — but diverge sharply in what happens next. Fivetran stops at loading data into your warehouse. Improvado continues through transformation, governance, and insight delivery. These architectural differences create four distinct outcomes that determine which tool fits your team.

Your marketing team operates the pipeline — no engineering backlog

Fivetran delivers raw data to your warehouse. If you need "cost per conversion" calculated consistently across Google Ads, Meta, and LinkedIn, someone has to write that logic. In practice, that means either your data team builds DBT models (adding weeks to implementation and creating a dependency), or your marketing analysts work with inconsistent field names and manual calculations in spreadsheets.

Improvado includes a no-code transformation layer with pre-built marketing data models. The Marketing Cloud Data Model (MCDM) maps 46,000+ metrics and dimensions to standardized field names — "impressions" means the same thing whether it came from TikTok or The Trade Desk. Marketers configure transformations through a visual interface; data engineers can drop into SQL for complex edge cases. The dual-persona design means marketing teams don't wait on IT for every new calculated field.

Improvado review

"Now, we don't have to involve our technical team in the reporting part at all. Improvado saves about 90 hours per week and allows us to focus on data analysis rather than routine data aggregation, normalization, and formatting."

Jeff Lee

This matters when speed determines whether you catch budget overruns before month-end or discover attribution gaps while the campaign is still running. Fivetran assumes you have the engineering capacity to build that layer. Improvado assumes you don't — and delivers it pre-built.

Marketing Data Governance stops errors before they reach dashboards

Fivetran monitors pipeline health — whether data synced, whether schemas changed, whether API calls succeeded. It doesn't know if your CPM suddenly doubled because of a tracking error, if UTM parameters are malformed, or if yesterday's spike in conversions came from a bot farm. Those are marketing data quality problems, and they require marketing domain knowledge to detect.

Improvado ships with 250+ pre-built governance rules that validate marketing data semantics: budget pacing alerts, anomaly detection on conversion rates, UTM taxonomy enforcement, cross-channel metric reconciliation. When a connector pulls data that violates expected ranges or business rules, the platform flags it before it hits your warehouse — not after your CMO asks why the board deck shows contradictory numbers.

Governance isn't a feature add-on; it's the difference between a data pipeline and a trusted reporting system. Fivetran gives you the former. Improvado delivers the latter, with lineage tracking that lets you trace every number back to its API source and transformation logic.

Improvado review

“If we don't trust the data, the agency won’t trust the reports and won't give them to the client. They’ll start pulling data manually to Excel and spend a lot of time comparing platform numbers to reports. With Improvado, we now trust the data. If anything is wrong, it’s how someone on the team is viewing it, not the data itself. It’s 99.9% accurate.”

Tyler Corcoran

One platform for all marketing analytics — not a patchwork of tools

The Fivetran workflow assumes a downstream analytics stack: you extract data with Fivetran, transform it in DBT, visualize it in Looker or Tableau, and layer on point solutions for attribution or incrementality testing. Each tool adds licensing costs, integration complexity, and a new vendor relationship. For a mid-market brand running 15 paid channels, that's a minimum four-vendor stack before you've answered a single business question.

Improvado consolidates extraction, transformation, governance, and delivery into one platform. You connect sources once, apply transformations through the same interface where you monitor data quality, and push clean datasets to any BI tool or directly to stakeholder dashboards. The reduction in tool sprawl shows up as cost savings (one contract instead of four), faster onboarding (one system to learn), and elimination of integration bugs at tool boundaries.

Agencies scaling across dozens of clients see this consolidation as a force multiplier. One Improvado workspace replicates to 50 client deployments in minutes — templatized extraction configs, pre-built governance rules, standardized dashboards. Fivetran can replicate connectors, but the transformation and governance layers still need custom builds per client.

Dedicated customer success — not ticket-only support

Fivetran's support model scales with plan tier. Standard plans get email and documentation. Business Critical plans add dedicated support with SLAs. Professional services are available but billed separately. The model assumes you have internal expertise to handle configuration, troubleshooting, and optimization — support answers questions, but you drive implementation.

Improvado includes a dedicated Customer Success Manager and professional services in every contract — not as an upsell. Your CSM isn't a support agent responding to tickets; they're a strategic partner who tracks your goals, proactively identifies data quality issues, and architects solutions for new use cases before you have to ask. When API changes break a connector, Improvado's team fixes it automatically and notifies you. When your data model needs to evolve, your CSM coordinates the change across extraction, transformation, and reporting layers.

This difference shows up most clearly during onboarding and scaling. Fivetran hands you the keys and expects you to drive. Improvado sits in the passenger seat until you're confident, then stays on call for the complex merges.

Improvado review

“Having a single point of contact simplifies everything. If we ever need assistance, we can reach out directly to Improvado instead of managing it internally. That's worth something.”

Jonathan Hemnes

EVP of Engineering

When to Choose Fivetran

Fivetran excels in scenarios where Improvado's marketing-specific depth becomes unnecessary overhead. Choose Fivetran if:

• You have a data engineering team that owns transformation in DBT. If your organization already runs a mature DBT stack and your data team prefers writing SQL transformations themselves, Fivetran's extraction-only model fits cleanly into that workflow. You're not paying for transformation features you won't use.
• You need broad source coverage beyond marketing. Fivetran supports database replication, SaaS tools across domains (HR, finance, operations), and file-based sources. If your data warehouse consolidates more than just marketing data, Fivetran's generalist connector library offers wider coverage than Improvado's marketing focus.
• Your team prioritizes multi-warehouse flexibility. Fivetran's architecture makes switching between BigQuery, Snowflake, and Redshift straightforward, with simultaneous delivery to multiple destinations. If your infrastructure strategy requires that level of destination flexibility, Fivetran's design accommodates it natively.
• You're comfortable with usage-based pricing tied to data volume. If your data volumes are predictable and you're willing to monitor MAR consumption to avoid cost escalation, Fivetran's transparent per-row pricing can be cost-effective for smaller deployments or infrequent sync schedules.
• Your use case doesn't require marketing-specific governance. If data quality checks happen downstream in your BI tool or DBT tests, and you don't need pre-built validation rules for marketing metrics, Fivetran's monitoring-focused approach may be sufficient.

The honest answer: Fivetran is a production-grade ELT tool that does one thing exceptionally well — automated extraction and loading with minimal maintenance. If that's all you need, it's a strong choice. Improvado adds transformation, governance, and insight layers that marketing teams require but general ELT tools don't provide.

What Customers Say

The difference between extraction-only and full-pipeline platforms shows up most clearly in customer outcomes. Here's how teams using Improvado describe the shift from managing data pipelines to actually using the data.

Case study

At Signal Theory, for most clients, the reporting process is now fully automated, taking 30 minutes to an hour at most. For clients with unique data sources requiring manual input, the system is flexible enough to accommodate specific needs without compromising overall efficiency. Read full case study →

“Reports that used to take hours now only take about 30 minutes. We're reporting for significantly more clients, even though it is only being handled by a single person. That's been huge for us.”

Shayna Tyler

Analyst, Signal Theory

Case study

At Yodel Mobile, the most significant impact has been the dramatic reduction in time spent on routine reporting tasks. What previously required hours of manual data manipulation can now be completed in minutes. Read full case study →

“On the reporting side, we saw a significant amount of time saved! Some of our data sources required lots of manipulation, and now it's automated and done very quickly. Now we save about 80% of time for the team.”

Kasia Pasich

Data Analyst, Yodel Mobile

These aren't isolated cases. Across 200+ customers, the pattern repeats: teams that previously spent 40–60% of their time wrangling data now spend that time on analysis, optimization, and strategy. The platform doesn't just move data faster — it changes what the team is capable of delivering.

Pricing Comparison

Fivetran Pricing

Fivetran uses usage-based pricing measured in Monthly Active Rows (MAR) — the number of unique rows synced or activated each month. Pricing varies by plan tier and volume band, with automated discounts at higher consumption levels. As of January 2026, Fivetran applies a $5 minimum charge per connection for usage between 1 million and 1 million MAR, affecting multi-source deployments even at low volumes.

Typical costs (based on public pricing and customer reports):

• Small team (3–5 connectors): $1,500–$3,000/month on Standard plan
• Mid-size team (10+ connectors): $4,000–$8,000/month
• Enterprise deployment: $10,000+/month on Business Critical plan

Additional costs include transformation credits (DBT model runs beyond the 5,000/month free tier at $0.02/credit), activation fees for reverse ETL, and potential monthly billing markup (25–40% vs. annual contracts). Costs scale unpredictably with data freshness — syncing hourly vs. daily can double MAR consumption for high-volume sources.

Improvado Pricing

Improvado uses outcome-based pricing that scales with business value rather than data volume. Pricing is customized per deployment based on number of data sources, required transformation complexity, user count, and support level. The model avoids the unpredictable cost escalation common in MAR-based systems — you're not penalized for syncing data more frequently or adding granular dimensions.

What's included at every tier:

• Dedicated Customer Success Manager (not an add-on)
• Professional services for onboarding and ongoing optimization
• Custom connector builds with 2–4 week SLA
• Marketing Data Governance with 250+ pre-built rules
• Marketing Cloud Data Model (MCDM) for field harmonization
• SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR compliance

Request a custom quote based on your specific deployment requirements. Pricing conversations start with understanding your goals, not counting rows.

Total Cost of Ownership

Comparing sticker prices misses hidden costs in both directions. Fivetran's MAR pricing appears transparent but excludes transformation tooling (DBT Cloud subscriptions start at $100/developer/month), ongoing engineering time to maintain custom models, and separate BI tool licensing. For a team managing 20 marketing sources with daily syncs, the fully-loaded cost includes Fivetran + DBT + BI + 0.5 FTE data engineer — often $15,000–$25,000/month before you've answered a business question.

Improvado's higher per-platform cost includes transformation, governance, professional services, and dedicated support — eliminating the need for separate DBT, governance, and services contracts. For the same 20-source deployment, Improvado typically delivers lower total cost of ownership when you account for eliminated tooling and reduced internal engineering overhead.

The deciding factor isn't which platform costs less in isolation — it's whether you're building and maintaining the transformation + governance layer yourself (Fivetran model) or buying it as a managed service (Improvado model). Teams with data engineering capacity often prefer the former. Marketing teams without that luxury need the latter.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main difference between Improvado and Fivetran?

Fivetran is an ELT automation tool focused on extracting data from hundreds of sources and loading it into your warehouse with minimal configuration. Improvado is an end-to-end marketing analytics platform that combines extraction, transformation, governance, and insight delivery in one system. The core difference: Fivetran stops at data delivery; Improvado continues through making that data analysis-ready with pre-built marketing data models, validation rules, and no-code transformation tools.

Does Improvado support as many data sources as Fivetran?

Improvado supports 500+ marketing and sales data sources, including all major ad platforms, social networks, analytics tools, and CRMs. Fivetran offers broader coverage across non-marketing domains (databases, SaaS apps, file systems). For marketing-specific use cases, Improvado's connector library is deeper — including platforms like The Trade Desk, AppsFlyer, and Adjust that require custom builds in Fivetran. If you need database replication or HR/finance tool integration, Fivetran's generalist approach covers more ground.

Can I use DBT with Improvado?

Yes. Improvado delivers transformed data to your warehouse in a DBT-compatible format, and you can layer additional DBT models on top if needed. However, most customers find Improvado's built-in transformation layer (Marketing Cloud Data Model + visual recipe builder + SQL editor) eliminates the need for separate DBT workflows — the marketing-specific logic is already handled. Teams with existing DBT infrastructure can choose whether to use Improvado's transformations, their own DBT models, or a hybrid approach.

How long does it take to migrate from Fivetran to Improvado?

Typical migration timelines run 2–4 weeks depending on the number of sources and complexity of existing transformations. Improvado's professional services team maps your current Fivetran connectors to equivalent Improvado sources, replicates transformation logic in the platform's recipe builder or SQL layer, and validates data parity before cutover. Most teams run Fivetran and Improvado in parallel for 1–2 weeks to confirm identical outputs before decommissioning the old pipeline.

Do I need a data engineering team to use Improvado?

No. Improvado is designed for dual-persona use: marketers operate the platform through no-code interfaces for connecting sources, building dashboards, and configuring transformations, while data engineers can drop into SQL for complex custom logic. Many customers have zero dedicated data engineering resources — the platform's pre-built data models and CSM-led implementation handle what would normally require engineering work. If you do have engineering capacity, they can extend the platform through custom SQL transformations and API integrations.

When does Fivetran make more sense than Improvado?

Fivetran is the better choice when you have a mature data engineering team that prefers owning transformation logic in DBT, you need broad source coverage beyond marketing (databases, SaaS tools across departments), or your use case genuinely requires only extraction and loading without downstream transformation or governance. If your team has the capacity to build and maintain marketing data models in-house, Fivetran's extraction-only focus avoids paying for features you won't use.

Why does Improvado use custom pricing instead of transparent per-row pricing like Fivetran?

Improvado's outcome-based pricing reflects the reality that different deployments have vastly different requirements — a 10-person in-house team managing 15 sources needs different transformation depth, support intensity, and SLAs than a 200-person agency managing 500 client workspaces. Per-row pricing optimizes for simplicity but penalizes teams that need fresh data or high-dimensionality metrics. Custom pricing lets Improvado align cost with actual business value (number of users, data complexity, required support level) rather than infrastructure metrics like row counts. In practice, customers report more predictable costs than volume-based models where sync frequency changes can double monthly bills.

Does Improvado support real-time data syncing?

Improvado supports sync frequencies from hourly to monthly depending on source API limits and customer requirements. Most marketing platforms don't offer true real-time APIs (Google Ads, Meta, and LinkedIn update metrics on 1–4 hour delays regardless of sync tool). Improvado optimizes for the freshest data each platform can reliably deliver without hitting rate limits or returning incomplete results. Fivetran offers similar frequency ranges — both platforms are bound by the same upstream API constraints, not by their own technical limitations.

Choose the Platform That Matches Your Team's Capacity

The Fivetran vs. Improvado decision isn't about which platform has more features — it's about whether your team has the engineering capacity to build the transformation and governance layers yourself, or whether you need that delivered as part of the platform. Fivetran assumes you'll handle downstream complexity. Improvado eliminates it.

If your team spends more time debugging data pipelines than analyzing campaign performance, that's a signal. The tools aren't the constraint — the operational model is.