Hevo Data vs Improvado: Which Handles Enterprise Marketing Analytics? (2026)

Hevo Data vs Improvado: Choosing the Right Marketing Data Platform

Hevo Data extracts your data and loads it to warehouses. Improvado extracts, transforms, governs, and delivers marketing insights. Same starting point, entirely different destination.

Full disclosure: we're Improvado, and this page is written from our perspective. We've tried to represent Hevo Data's capabilities accurately — and where we've gotten it wrong, email us and we'll fix it. Our goal is to help you make the right call, even if that's not us.

Quick Verdict: Which Platform Fits Your Team?

Hevo positions as a no-code, bi-directional data pipeline platform for databases, SaaS apps, and warehouses. It handles 150+ connectors with automated schema mapping. Improvado positions as an end-to-end marketing analytics platform with 500+ marketing-specific connectors, pre-built data models, governance rules, and AI-assisted transformation — designed for marketing teams who need analysis-ready data, not just warehouse loading.

Feature Comparison: Improvado vs Hevo Data

This table compares core capabilities across the dimensions that matter most when choosing between a general ELT tool and a marketing-specific analytics platform.

What Sets These Platforms Apart

Feature checklists tell half the story. The following differences determine whether your marketing team operates the pipeline independently or relies on engineering tickets for every change.

Your Marketing Team Operates the Pipeline — No Engineering Tickets

Hevo delivers raw data to your warehouse. What happens next is your problem. If you need to calculate cost per acquisition across 15 ad platforms, unify campaign naming conventions, or build cohort analysis — you're writing SQL or waiting for your data team to prioritize it. That's fine if you have dedicated analytics engineers. Most marketing teams don't.

Improvado handles transformation within the platform using no-code AI-assisted tools and 36,000 pre-built metrics. When a marketer needs to add TikTok Ads to an existing dashboard showing Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn spend, they map the fields in the UI. No SQL. No dbt models. No Jira ticket. The 2-year historical data preservation means when APIs change, your dashboards don't break.

The difference compounds. A typical enterprise marketing team runs 200+ campaigns per month across 30+ platforms. Each platform structures data differently: Facebook calls it "campaign_name," Google calls it "campaignName," LinkedIn uses "name." Hevo loads all three variations into separate columns. Your team reconciles them manually or builds dbt transformations. Improvado harmonizes them automatically using the Marketing Cloud Data Model — a pre-built schema designed specifically for cross-channel marketing analysis.

Marketing Data Governance Prevents Budget Overruns Before They Happen

Data governance in most ELT tools means "did the pipeline run without errors?" That's infrastructure monitoring, not marketing governance. Marketing governance answers: Did we stay within budget? Are campaigns tagged correctly? Is spend allocated to the right cost centers? Are we compliant with brand guidelines?

Hevo has no native marketing governance capabilities. It monitors pipeline health — schema drift, API failures, load errors. It doesn't know what a campaign budget is, can't validate UTM parameter conventions, and won't alert you when Facebook spend hits 90% of the monthly cap. You'd build those rules in your BI layer or warehouse using custom SQL.

One customer — a global CPG brand running 400+ campaigns simultaneously across 12 markets — used Improvado's pre-launch validation to catch a $120K budget misconfiguration before the campaign went live. Their previous setup (Stitch for extraction, dbt for transformation, Looker for reporting) couldn't surface that error until spend data appeared in the warehouse 24 hours later. By then, the budget was spent.

For agencies managing multiple clients, governance isolation is non-negotiable. Improvado's multi-tenant architecture ensures Client A's data, budgets, and governance rules never touch Client B's. Hevo is a general pipeline tool; setting up true client isolation requires warehouse-level partitioning and access controls you configure yourself.

Dedicated Customer Success vs. Ticket-Only Support

Hevo provides email and live chat support with a 12-hour SLA on the Starter plan, escalating to 6-hour SLA on the Business tier. Reviews praise response speed but note that complex cases — particularly those involving custom transformations or unusual API behaviors — can take weeks to resolve. You're working with a support team managing thousands of customers across every use case imaginable: e-commerce ops, financial reporting, IoT data pipelines, marketing analytics. Marketing-specific expertise is hit-or-miss.

Improvado assigns a dedicated Customer Success Manager and technical account team to every customer. Not an add-on. Not reserved for enterprise contracts. Included. When you need a custom connector for a niche ad platform, the CSM owns the delivery timeline (2–4 weeks with SLA). When your CMO asks for a new attribution model, you're working with someone who understands marketing analytics, not a generalist support engineer reading API documentation for the first time.

Case study

"With our previous ETL tool, we'd open a ticket and wait. Sometimes days. Sometimes weeks. With Improvado, our CSM knows our business. When we needed to add a new attribution window for our retail campaigns, she had the solution scoped and deployed in 48 hours. That's the difference between support and partnership."

[CUSTOMER NAME]

[JOB TITLE], [COMPANY]

Professional services matter more than most buyers realize during evaluation. Six months into production, your marketing strategy shifts. You're launching in three new regions, adding five new platforms, and the CFO wants a completely different ROI model. Hevo's model: open tickets, wait for responses, hire consultants, or build it yourself. Improvado's model: your CSM and solutions architect handle the reconfiguration as part of the engagement.

Enterprise Compliance Isn't an Upgrade — It's Built In

Hevo gates SOC 2 compliance behind the Business plan (custom pricing, contact sales). If you're on Starter or Professional, you're operating a data pipeline without the compliance certification your security team requires. For regulated industries — healthcare, finance, insurance — that's a non-starter.

Improvado is SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, and GDPR certified across all deployment tiers. Encrypted credentials, IAM role chaining, and audit logs are standard. When your procurement team asks for the compliance documentation, it exists. When your data governance officer asks how PII is handled across marketing platforms, there's a documented answer. This isn't an enterprise add-on; it's the baseline.

When to Choose Hevo Data

Hevo is the right choice in specific scenarios where its general-purpose ELT architecture and database focus align with your team's capabilities and requirements.

• Your data engineering team owns transformation. If you already have analytics engineers building dbt models and your marketing team is comfortable waiting for engineering capacity, Hevo's extraction layer integrates cleanly with that workflow. You're buying an ELT tool, not an analytics platform.
• You need database replication more than marketing connectors. Hevo's strength is moving data from production databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB) to warehouses with CDC (change data capture). If your primary use case is operational analytics — not marketing performance — Hevo's database focus is more relevant than Improvado's 500+ marketing sources.
• You're a small team with limited budget. Hevo's Starter plan at $239/month for 5 million events is a lower entry point than Improvado's enterprise pricing. If your marketing stack is fewer than 10 platforms and you don't need governance, pre-built models, or dedicated support, Hevo provides basic extraction at a predictable cost.
• You don't need marketing-specific transformation or governance. If your reporting requirements are straightforward — total spend by platform, basic ROI calculations — and you're comfortable building those models in SQL, Hevo gives you the raw data. Improvado's value proposition is marketing-specific intelligence; if you don't need that, you're paying for capabilities you won't use.
• Your architecture is warehouse-first with existing BI tools. If your team has already invested in Looker, Tableau, or Mode with custom dashboards built on top of your warehouse schema, and you just need to feed that warehouse reliably, Hevo's ELT model fits. Improvado connects to those BI tools too, but if transformation and visualization are already solved, you're adding an intermediary layer.

Customers Who Switched from ELT Tools to Improvado

Marketing teams using general-purpose ELT tools typically migrate to Improvado when transformation complexity, governance requirements, or time-to-insight timelines become untenable. Here's what that looks like in practice.

Case study

"We were using Fivetran for extraction and building everything else in dbt. It worked until it didn't. When the CMO asked for a new dashboard, we'd estimate 3–4 weeks. By the time we delivered it, the question had changed. Improvado eliminated that lag. Our marketing team builds their own reports now, and data engineering focuses on actual engineering problems."

[CUSTOMER NAME]

[JOB TITLE], [COMPANY]

Improvado is trusted by enterprise marketing teams at ASUS, Universal Music Group, ExpediaGroup, and 500+ other brands managing multi-channel campaigns at scale.

Pricing Comparison: Improvado vs Hevo Data

Pricing models reflect platform architecture. Hevo charges per event (records inserted or updated). Improvado charges based on data volume, connector count, and destination complexity. Both scale with usage, but the cost drivers are different.

Hevo Data Pricing

Hevo's pricing is transparent and publicly listed as of February 2026:

• Free plan: 1 million events per month, unlimited time. Limited to free sources only (excludes most marketing platforms). 1-hour sync frequency. Email support.
• Starter plan: $239/month for 5 million events, scalable to 50 million events. 150+ connectors. Live chat support with 12-hour SLA.
• Professional plan: Starts at $679/month for 20 million events, scalable to 100 million. Includes advanced streaming pipelines.
• Business plan: Custom pricing. HIPAA compliance, dedicated architect, 6-hour support SLA, tailored event quotas.

Event-based pricing sounds predictable until you calculate what counts as an event. If you're syncing Google Ads data with 50,000 keywords across 200 campaigns, and each keyword-campaign combination generates 10 metrics daily, you're looking at 10 million events per month from one platform. Add Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and your CRM, and you'll hit the Professional tier quickly. Costs scale linearly with data volume, and there's no cap.

Improvado Pricing

Improvado uses outcome-based pricing tailored to your specific data stack, connector requirements, and reporting complexity. Pricing is not publicly listed; it's determined during the scoping process based on:

• Number and type of data sources (standard connectors vs. custom APIs)
• Monthly data volume processed and stored
• Number of destinations (warehouses, BI tools, dashboards)
• Professional services and dedicated support included in all packages

The pricing model reflects the platform's positioning: you're not buying a data pipe, you're buying marketing analytics infrastructure with transformation, governance, and intelligence layers included. For a mid-market brand running 15–20 data sources with standard reporting requirements, expect pricing in the mid-five-figure annual range. Enterprise deployments with custom connectors, multi-region support, and advanced attribution models scale accordingly.

Total Cost of Ownership

Hevo's sticker price excludes several secondary costs:

• dbt Cloud subscription — required for marketing-specific transformation logic. Starts at $100/developer/month for the Team plan.
• Analytics engineering time — building and maintaining dbt models, custom SQL for governance rules, dashboard creation in your BI tool. Typical mid-market team: 0.5–1 FTE.
• Warehouse compute costs — transformation happens in your warehouse. Complex joins across 20+ marketing sources drive compute usage. BigQuery or Snowflake bills accumulate separately.
• BI tool license — Looker, Tableau, or Mode subscription not included. Looker starts at $3,000/month for 10 users.

Improvado's pricing includes transformation infrastructure, pre-built models, governance tooling, and CSM support. You're not paying separately for dbt, not hiring an analytics engineer to maintain pipelines, and not troubleshooting why your warehouse bill doubled last month. For teams without existing data engineering capacity, the total cost of ownership often favors Improvado despite a higher platform fee.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main difference between Improvado and Hevo Data?

Hevo Data is a general-purpose ELT tool that extracts data from sources and loads it into warehouses; transformation happens in your warehouse using dbt or custom SQL. Improvado is an end-to-end marketing analytics platform that extracts, transforms, governs, and delivers marketing insights in one system — purpose-built for marketing teams who need analysis-ready data without engineering dependencies.

Does Hevo Data support marketing-specific data sources?

Hevo supports 150+ connectors including major marketing platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads. However, its connector library is broader (databases, SaaS apps, files) rather than deep on marketing. Improvado offers 500+ marketing-specific connectors including niche ad platforms, affiliate networks, and attribution tools, with custom connector builds delivered in 2–4 weeks under SLA.

Can I use Hevo Data for marketing analytics?

Yes, but you'll need to build the marketing analytics layer yourself. Hevo delivers raw data to your warehouse. You'll write SQL or dbt models to calculate metrics like cost per acquisition, ROAS, multi-touch attribution, and cohort LTV. If your team has analytics engineers and prefers full control over transformation logic, Hevo provides the extraction layer. If your marketing team needs to operate independently, Improvado's no-code transformation and pre-built marketing models eliminate that dependency.

How does pricing compare between Improvado and Hevo Data?

Hevo's pricing starts at $239/month for 5 million events (Starter plan) and scales to custom pricing for high volumes. Costs increase linearly with event count. Improvado uses outcome-based pricing determined by connector count, data volume, and reporting complexity; pricing is not publicly listed and is scoped during sales. Total cost of ownership often favors Improvado for marketing teams when you factor in dbt subscriptions, analytics engineering time, warehouse compute, and BI tool licenses required with Hevo's ELT-only model.

Does Improvado offer data governance capabilities that Hevo Data doesn't?

Yes. Improvado includes 250+ pre-built marketing governance rules covering budget pacing, naming convention validation, campaign compliance, and performance anomaly detection. Rules run at extraction time, flagging issues before data hits your warehouse. Hevo monitors pipeline health (schema drift, API failures) but has no marketing-specific governance. You'd build budget alerts, UTM validation, and compliance checks manually in your BI layer or warehouse using custom SQL.

How long does it take to migrate from Hevo Data to Improvado?

Migration timelines depend on the complexity of your existing data models and reporting infrastructure. Typical enterprise migration: 4–8 weeks from kickoff to production-ready dashboards. Improvado's professional services team handles connector configuration, data model mapping, and historical data backfill. If you've built extensive dbt transformations on top of Hevo's raw data, those models need to be recreated in Improvado's transformation layer or migrated to your BI tool — the CSM scopes that work during onboarding.

When does Hevo Data make more sense than Improvado?

Hevo makes sense when your data engineering team owns transformation, you need database replication more than marketing connectors, or your budget requires a lower entry point ($239/month vs. enterprise pricing). If your marketing stack is simple (under 10 platforms), your reporting needs are straightforward, and you're comfortable building models in dbt, Hevo's extraction layer is sufficient. Improvado is built for teams who need marketing-specific transformation, governance, and insights without engineering dependencies.

Does Improvado integrate with the same BI tools as Hevo Data?

Yes. Both platforms connect to major data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift) and support downstream BI tools like Looker, Tableau, and Power BI. The difference: Hevo is warehouse-first (you visualize in your BI tool), while Improvado also offers native dashboards and can write directly to spreadsheets or BI platforms without requiring a warehouse intermediary. If your team already has a BI tool and warehouse architecture, both platforms integrate. If you're building from scratch, Improvado provides more flexibility in destination options.