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Fivetran is a popular data movement platform used to aggregate data into a warehouse and transform it for analysis and operational use. It's a powerful solution—but not without its flaws and limitations. If you’ve run into challenges with Fivetran or are considering whether to integrate it, this guide breaks down the top Fivetran alternatives.
We’ll cover core ETL capabilities, marketing-specific connectors, ease of use, transformation options, and Fivetran’s key limitations for marketing teams—plus how each alternative addresses those gaps.
Fivetran Overview
Fivetran is a fully managed cloud ELT platform or a data management platform. Fivetran’s pipeline is known for being robust and scalable, handling large volumes and incremental updates.
Fivetran offers a large library of over 700 pre-built connectors spanning many domains. But in terms of marketing sources, Fivetran’s site lists around 90 marketing-specific data sources, including Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Twitter Ads, Google Analytics, HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Mailchimp, Shopify, and so on.
For data transformation, Fivetran integrates with dbt (Data Build Tool), an open-source SQL transformation framework. Fivetran allows you to schedule dbt models, to run after data is loaded, and even provides some UI around scheduling and monitoring those transforms.
Fivetran is designed to load data into cloud data warehouses and lakes. It supports all the big names: Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Azure Synapse, etc. It also can load to data lake storage like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob.
Fivetran does not offer any native reporting or dashboarding. It’s a pure data pipeline service. It’s important to highlight that Fivetran is meant to be one component in a modern data stack, not an end-to-end platform.
Fivetran Pricing
Fivetran employs a usage-based pricing model centered around Monthly Active Rows (MAR). The more your data changes, the more you pay.
The platform offers several pricing tiers that provide MAR allowances and different features, for example, frequency of data sync, integration for dbt, and others.
Fivetran Pros
- Fully managed, low-maintenance ELT pipelines.
- Reliable schema management and incremental updates.
- Native dbt integration for post-load transformations
- Fivetran maintains a community forum and a knowledge base for common questions.
Fivetran Cons
- Fivetran is primarily designed for raw data replication, it doesn’t provide a built-in environment for data analysis or extensive pre-load transformation. It expects you to do that in your warehouse.
- Pricing is unpredictable and scales quickly with data volume.
- No built-in dashboards or analytics—external BI tools are required.
- No pre-load transformation support, all modeling must happen post-load. Marketing teams often need to, for example, map campaign IDs to names, or combine data from multiple platforms – with Fivetran, you must do that later in SQL or via dbt.
- Limited flexibility for marketers or non-technical teams.
- Custom connector requests are only considered if there’s broad demand. While Function connector requires code for unsupported sources.
Best Fivetran Alternatives
The good news is that if Fivetran doesn’t meet your company’s data-integration needs, there are several alternatives to consider. Read on as we delve into the most popular Fivetran alternatives and competitors.
1. Improvado
By contrast, Improvado is a complete marketing data and intelligence platform. It handles not only the data pipeline but also the preparation of data for marketing analytics, campaign monitoring, and marketing intelligence.
Improvado supports over 500 marketing and sales data sources—significantly more than Fivetran’s marketing-specific count. This includes not only the common platforms Fivetran supports, but also many niche or region-specific marketing tools, such as Walmart Connect, Samsung DSP, and others.
Improvado also supports uploading offline data (like Excel, Google Sheets, email, or FTP/SFTP) and blending it with online data. This allows brands to analyze their TV, offline ads, and other data alongside digital channels.
Improvado also offers built-in transformation capabilities specifically oriented toward marketing use cases. Its no-code transformation framework includes AI mapping, blending, grouping, and joining data—all without code. Improvado provides multiple pre-built models and dashboards that can be implemented with just a few clicks. These include cross-channel models, paid media analytics, ecommerce models, and others. This simplifies setup and accelerates time to value for marketing teams.
In terms of data destinations, Improvado is quite flexible:
- Improvado can load data into popular warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and others, similar to Fivetran.
- It also provides data warehouse management services, which is especially helpful for marketing teams without dedicated IT support.
- Improvado includes native connectors or export options for tools like Tableau, Looker, and Looker Studio.
- You can also extract data via CSV or their API for use with other destinations if needed.
- Marketing Data Governance serves as an automated data quality and campaign monitoring system. It continuously validates data and monitors campaigns across various platforms against pre-defined rules, providing real-time alerts when deviations occur.
- AI Agent enhances data interaction by allowing users to query their marketing data using natural language. This feature translates user questions into SQL queries, providing instant insights without the need for technical expertise. AI Agent supports the creation of customized reports, visualizations, and dashboards, facilitating a more intuitive and efficient data analysis process.
Improvado Pricing
Improvado provides three pricing tiers, ranging in the number of unique rows, data sync frequency, historical data sync, and other features.
- Improvado provides access to all connectors and allows an unlimited number of accounts per data source across all pricing plans.
- Each Improvado package includes customization credits and professional services to tailor the platform to specific business requirements.
Talk to Improvado sales to discuss your data needs and business objectives and get a custom quote.
Improvado Pros
- Improvado is designed to serve marketing operations. It handles metrics, dimensions, and terminology native to marketing use cases.
- It allows users to define custom metrics and normalize data across platforms without SQL.
- Improvado is more than a data pipeline. It aggregates and prepares data for analysis but also automates marketing reporting with dashboard templates, performance monitoring tools, and AI insights.
- Improvado can run marketing intelligence on top of your data warehouse so that no data is moved or replicated outside your environment.
Improvado Cons
- Improvado is focused heavily on marketing and advertising. Not ideal for integrating product usage or operational systems outside of marketing unless combined with another tool.
- The platform doesn't feature an embedded SQL editor or user-executable scripts. If custom logic can't be implemented with no-code transformations, clients can reach out to the Improvado Professional Services team.
2. Stitch
Stitch is a close Fivetran alternative focused on the ETL/ELT pipeline layer rather than providing an end-to-end analytics platform. Stitch (now part of Talend) is a cloud-based ETL service designed for simplicity and cost-effectiveness.
It supports around 100+ sources officially, including common marketing ones like Google Ads, Campaign Manager, or Salesforce, and many more via community-contributed taps. However, compared to Fivetran or Improvado, Stitch has fewer native marketing connectors. The list is smaller, especially for less common services).
Stitch originally advertised itself as “ETL minus the T.” It performs no significant transformations out of the box. The philosophy is to replicate source data as-is. If you need to transform data, you do it after it’s in your warehouse using SQL or a separate tool. Stitch’s parent company, Talend, does offer heavy transformation tools, but those are separate products.
Stitch’s UI is clean and simple, but it’s very barebones. It was designed to be a self-service tool for developers and analysts to set up data replication quickly. For a marketer, using Stitch might be slightly easier than Fivetran initially because of its simplicity, but it has similar challenges. You can click to set up connectors without coding, but once data is flowing to a warehouse, Stitch provides no analytical interface or marketing-specific aids.
Stitch Pricing
Stitch offers a usage-based pricing model. The entry-level Standard plan starts at $100 per month, accommodating up to 5 million rows, and can scale up to 300 million rows per month.
The Advanced and Premium plans provide higher data volume limits, additional destinations, enhanced features, and HIPAA compliance options.
All plans include a 14-day free trial.
Stitch Pros
- Designed for self-service. Great for smaller teams or MVP use cases.
- Supports a wide range of community-built connectors through the Singer framework. Highly extensible for teams with developer resources.
Stitch Cons
- Stitch has no reporting or visualization layer whatsoever. It is purely a data loader.
- Focused on E and L, not ETL. All transformations must be handled downstream (in dbt, SQL, or your data warehouse). Not marketer-friendly.
- Support is email and ticket-based only, with limited assistance on implementation or strategic use cases.
- Fewer prebuilt connectors than Fivetran, Hevo, or Improvado. Many connectors are community-supported and may lack full functionality or reliability.
- The UI is minimal and assumes users understand data engineering basics. Not a good fit for marketers without SQL or BI experience.
3. Adverity
Similar to Improvado, Adverity is a more complete marketing data platform—not just a data pipeline. It helps aggregate, transform, and visualize data in one place.
The platform features an extensive library of over 600 data connectors, covering social, display, programmatic, analytics tools, mobile apps, CRMs, and even “other” categories like finance or weather data, if needed for correlation.
Adverity provides built-in transformation and data preparation capabilities via a web-based user interface with drag-and-drop workflows. It’s mostly no-code and visual, making it accessible to marketers with some training.
Adverity is flexible with destinations. It can send data to data warehouses, databases, BI tools, or file formats. However, many users leverage its internal storage and analytics capabilities.
Adverity has its own data store, where it retains ingested data and allows you to query and visualize it via its UI. This gives you a choice: you can use Adverity as the endpoint for analysis, never exporting data out, or set up exports to your own systems while still using its dashboards.
Adverity also includes default reporting applications and built-in visualization components. Users can drag and drop visualizations, set KPIs, and create interactive charts. Additionally, the platform supports features like alerts and AI-driven insights—for example, it can notify you if a KPI drops or an anomaly is detected.
Adverity Pricing
Adverity offers customized pricing based on factors like specific business needs, the number of data sources, data destinations, and desired features. All new users can begin with a 14-day free trial, which provides access to all Standard plan features but with a limited data row allowance.
Adverity Pros
- The tool is specifically designed for marketing data use cases, offering tailored workflows and metrics for marketing intelligence.
- Adverity supports one of the largest sets of pre-built connectors.
- Adverity provides built-in dashboards and default reporting templates. Enables marketers to analyze data directly in-platform without relying on external business intelligence tools.
Adverity Cons
- The platform is powerful but not immediately intuitive for non-technical users. Initial setup, especially for custom metrics or multi-source harmonization, has a steep learning curve and may require expert support.
- While solid for marketing reporting, Adverity dashboard customization is not as flexible or advanced as dedicated BI tools like Tableau or Looker.
- Customers mention query speed noticeably slows as the data volume grows, affecting productivity when working with historical analysis across multiple marketing channels.
4. Hevo Data
Similar to Stitch, Hevo Data is a Fivetran alternative focused on the ETL/ELT pipeline layer.
Hevo is a general ETL tool and supports 150+ data sources, including many popular marketing tools. Still, it’s fair to say Hevo is oriented toward the most commonly used sources, niche marketing platforms might not be supported.
One notable difference between Fivetran and Hevo Data is Hevo’s inclusion of built-in transformation capabilities, both preload and postload. Hevo offers a drag-and-drop transformation interface and integrates with dbt for users who want to build more advanced transformations.
Like Fivetran and Stitch, Hevo supports numerous destinations, mostly databases and data warehouses. The website also lists some analytics tools as supported destinations. Essentially, Hevo can load data into applications that accept API-based inputs, but its primary use is to load data into a database or warehouse where it can be analyzed with BI tools.
Similar to Fivetran, Hevo focuses on pipelines and does not include a reporting or dashboard layer.
However, in some contexts, Hevo supports Reverse ETL by enabling destination-to-source sync on select connectors—extending its use beyond traditional one-way data flows.
Hevo Data Pricing
Hevo Data employs an event-based pricing model, where costs are determined by the number of data events, such as inserts, updates, or deletions, processed each month.
The platform offers a Free plan, allowing up to 1 million events per month, suitable for small-scale data needs. All plans come with a 14-day free trial, enabling users to assess the platform's suitability before committing.
Hevo Data Pros
- Hevo has a user-friendly drag-and-drop transformation builder.
- The learning curve for Hevo is generally low, users often get up and running in hours.
- Hevo covers popular marketing sources and offers generic connectors, making it a solid middle ground between marketing-specific tools like Improvado and general-purpose platforms like Fivetran.
Hevo Data Cons
- The tool has data volume and performance limitations that can hinder scalability for large datasets.
- When integrating with new tools or adapting to schema changes, users often need to perform manual mappings.
- Hevo's library of connectors is relatively small, especially for less common data sources, which may necessitate custom development or alternative solutions.
- Troubleshooting issues can be difficult due to unclear error messages and a lack of detailed logs.
5. Airbyte
Airbyte is an open-source data integration platform. Similar to Fivetran, its core function is ELT (extract and load), meaning it replicates data from sources to destinations.
Airbyte now lists over 550 connectors in its marketplace, including both official and community-supported options. Users can modify existing connectors or build their own.
Airbyte provides a Normalization feature, which is essentially a post-load transformation using SQL. For more advanced transformations, Airbyte does not offer its own UI or tooling. Instead, it expects you to use dbt or write custom SQL.
Another notable feature is that Airbyte can be self-hosted—you can run an Airbyte server on your own machine or in the cloud. This can be beneficial for organizations in industries where secure data processing, compliance, and infrastructure control are critical.
Airbyte Pricing
Airbyte offers self-hosted and cloud-based deployment options, each with distinct pricing structures:
- The self-hosted version is open-source and free to use. While there are no licensing fees, users are responsible for managing their own hosting environments, which may involve costs related to servers, storage, and maintenance.
- The cloud-based version, known as Airbyte Cloud, is a fully managed service. It operates on a usage-based pricing model, where costs are determined by factors such as data volume and the number of pipelines.
Airbyte Pros
- Airbyte can be deployed on-premises, giving full control over security, compliance, and data residency—ideal for teams with strict governance requirements.
- Lets users create or customize connectors using a low-code builder or SDK, ideal for niche or proprietary sources.
- Volume-based pricing that can be significantly cheaper than Fivetran’s MAR model.
Airbyte Cons
- Airbyte is primarily designed as a data integration tool for engineers and data teams. It lacks marketer-friendly features like pre-built dashboards, report templates, or intuitive UI workflows tailored to campaign performance or attribution.
- Initial setup and ongoing maintenance (updates, scaling, backups) can be complex and time-consuming without dedicated DevOps or data engineering support. Even with Airbyte Cloud, configuring and managing pipelines often requires engineering knowledge.
- Many connectors are in beta/alpha stages and community-maintained. Production reliability may vary depending on the connector and may require debugging.
- Unlike platforms built specifically for marketing, Airbyte doesn't automatically unify naming conventions, campaign structures, or metrics across ad platforms—this must be done manually in a downstream tool.
Best Fivetran Alternative for Your Organization
Depending on your organization’s data integration needs, technical expertise, and the complexity of your data sources, there’s a Fivetran alternative that fits.
If your team works heavily with marketing and advertising data, needs customizable data models, and wants to reduce time spent on manual reporting, Improvado is the best option.
Unlike general-purpose ELT tools, Improvado is purpose-built for marketing analytics—offering automated data normalization, campaign-level monitoring, cross-channel performance tracking, and an AI Agent for fast, ad-hoc insights.
To see how Improvado can simplify your reporting and give your marketing team more control over their data, book a demo with our team today.
FAQ
Can Fivetran alternatives handle real-time data pipelines?
Some alternatives support real-time or near real-time data movement. Improvado offers near real-time ingestion for many sources. Airbyte supports streaming for selected connectors via CDC or Kafka. Performance depends on the source system and integration method used.
Which Fivetran competitors support the most connectors?
- Airbyte offers one of the largest catalogs, with hundreds of open-source and community-supported connectors.
- Improvado also provides extensive coverage of over 500 marketing and sales platforms, with enterprise-grade connector support and an option to request custom connector or ingest flat data via multiple tools.
- Stitch offers fewer connectors but covers the most common cloud tools and databases.
What are the best Fivetran alternatives for startups or SMBs?
For smaller teams, strong Fivetran alternatives include Airbyte, Stitch, and Hevo Data. Airbyte is open-source and highly customizable, making it ideal for teams with engineering resources. Stitch offers a simpler ETL experience with usage-based pricing that works well for predictable workloads. Hevo Data provides a no-code interface, making it a practical option for early-stage companies that want to move quickly without managing infrastructure. These tools are generally more flexible or affordable for startups and SMBs.
How does Fivetran compare with open-source ETL tools?
Fivetran offers a fully managed experience with minimal maintenance, focusing on ease of use and reliability at the cost of customization. Open-source tools require more setup and engineering support but allow greater control over connectors, transformations, and pipeline logic. The trade-off is between convenience and flexibility.
- Open-source = low-cost + high-maintenance.
- Fivetran = high-cost + low-maintenance.
What are the downsides of using Fivetran?
- Fivetran’s usage-based pricing model, based on Monthly Active Rows (MAR), can lead to unpredictable costs—especially as data volume or sync frequency increases.
- It offers minimal control over connector configurations and sync schedules, which can be limiting for teams with specialized data workflows.
- Fivetran doesn’t support pre-load transformations, relying entirely on dbt for post-load modeling, which requires SQL and adds complexity.
- There are no built-in reporting or dashboarding capabilities, so users must connect external BI tools for analysis.
- The platform is not tailored for marketing use cases—there’s no native support for campaign-level data harmonization or channel normalization.
- For non-technical teams, the lack of no-code options and heavy reliance on SQL makes Fivetran harder to adopt without engineering support.
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