AWS Glue vs Fivetran comparison

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AWS Glue

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

AWS Glue and Fivetran compete in data integration and management. AWS Glue appears to have an advantage due to its strong integration within the AWS ecosystem and automation features, whereas Fivetran is notable for its seamless connectors and ease of automation.

Features: AWS Glue offers a data catalog, efficient triggers for scheduling ETL processes, and strong AWS integration. It is notable for its code-generation capabilities and scalable cloud features. Fivetran is appreciated for automation in data replication and seamless connectors with diverse applications. Its integration with DBT for data transformation and replication is also notable.

Room for Improvement: AWS Glue could improve startup time, expand language support, and enhance cross-cloud compatibility. Fivetran should focus on enhancing data pipeline observability, increasing connector options, and improving pricing transparency and logging features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: AWS Glue supports private, hybrid, and public cloud deployments but has a learning curve, with costly yet reliable customer service. Fivetran is primarily public cloud-based, offering efficient hybrid integration with positively regarded but costly customer service.

Pricing and ROI: AWS Glue's pay-as-you-go model supports scalability, but it can be expensive for extensive data use, requiring careful cost planning. Fivetran's pricing based on data usage might be costly, but costs decrease with high data usage. Both products promise ROI through efficiency, but Fivetran's pricing model could lead to unexpected costs.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Glue vs. Fivetran Report (Updated: December 2024).

AWS Glue vs. Fivetran

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Categories and Ranking

AWS Glue

Ranking in Cloud Data Integration

1st

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Fivetran

Ranking in Cloud Data Integration

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Integration (13th), Data Replication (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Cloud Data Integration category, the mindshare of AWS Glue is 24.8%, up from 24.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fivetran is 5.5%, up from 4.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Ajaykumar Myana

Senior Software Developer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Provides serverless mechanism, easy data transformation and automated infrastructure management

We no longer had to worry much about infrastructure management because AWS Glue is serverless, and Amazon takes care of the underlying infrastructure. This allowed us to focus on the code and application logic without concerns about scaling, CPU management, or handling fluctuations in flow. The serverless nature of Glue jobs relieved us from these infrastructure-related worries.

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Erik Jones

Head of BI and Analytics at HyperScience

Solution reduces time-to-value; high ROI

Fivetran has room for improvement in data pipeline observability. The Fivetran logs are fairly basic, compared to, for example, the insight Fivetran gives into helping users understanding the performance of data pipelines. So I think their observability into the pipeline itself could be improved. In addition, Fivetran is in the very early stages of allowing other companies to access its metadata API, but that's something that could use improvement, and I know that they're working on right now. We use a separate tool for "reverse ETL", which is the opposite of what Fivetran does; it pushes data from your data warehouse back out to business applications. If Fivetran pulls data from those same applications, they should also enable users to push it back. I would love to do both ETL and reverse ETL in the same tool. It would be nice if Fivetran offered both their regular offering plus the reverse ETL option as well.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The facility to integrate with S3 and the possibility to use Jupyter Notebook inside the pipeline are the most valuable features."

"It's fairly straightforward as a product; it's not very complicated."

"AWS Glue's most valuable features are the data catalog, including crawlers and tables, and Glue Studio, which means you don't have to use custom code."

"It is a very scalable solution."

"The solution is highly user-friendly, and its features are easy to use. The new addition of AWS Glue Data Catalog is also very beneficial, making the tool even more helpful for its users."

"The most valuable feature of AWS Glue is that it provides a GUI format with a drag-and-drop feature."

"The most valuable feature of AWS Glue is its ease of use and good documentation. Additionally, we can do all the transformations that we need."

"You do not need many frameworks to run Glue."

More AWS Glue pros

"The most valuable feature of Fivetran is that it only synchronizes what needs to be synchronized."

"The product has some seamless connectors, which are readily available."

"It is not like a traditional ETL, but it gives quite a lot of flexibility."

"Making the decision to implement Fivetran was supported by the fact that they have better connectors than other competitors."

"Fivetran's most valuable feature is replication."

"Its arrays are powerful enough to handle migrations even when the replication is happening in the background, without causing any trouble with the ongoing traffic."

"Fivetran can perform data migration incredibly fast, depending on the source and target."

"The user interface is mostly UI-based, eliminating the need for a lot of coding."

More Fivetran pros

Cons

"In terms of performance, if they can further optimize the execution time for serverless jobs, it would be a welcome improvement."

"If there's a cluster-related configuration, we have to make worker notes, which is quite a headache when processing a large amount of data."

"I have encountered challenges with multi-region support."

"Only people who can code, either in Java or Python, can use the product freely. Those who don't know Java or Python might find using AWS Glue difficult."

"The solution’s stability could be improved."

"Setting up pipelines is challenging, especially with version control and testing requirements."

"One area that could be improved is the ETL view. The drag-and-drop interface is not as user-friendly as some other ETL tools."

"I haven't looked into Glue in terms of seeking out flaws. I've not come across missing features."

More AWS Glue cons

"I would like Fivetran to implement additional resource monitoring and restriction policies."

"I would like for them to incorporate additional transformations. A valuable aspect of the product is that it does inflight transformations and that could be expanded."

"The solution is very expensive. I would like to have a better integration of the solution with Azure."

"The biggest area for improvement is in customization, particularly in how Fivetran socializes its tools."

"We experience cost issues because Fivetran is charged on a usage basis. When you reach a certain level, the tool should focus on reducing the costs. The solution is expensive when you are moving gigabytes and petabytes of data. It should also focus more on REST APIs and webhooks."

"Fivetran could improve in the area of customization, especially in how they socialize their tools."

"We use a separate tool for "reverse ETL", which is the opposite of what Fivetran does; it pushes data from your data warehouse back out to business applications. If Fivetran pulls data from those same applications, they should also enable users to push it back. I would love to do both ETL and reverse ETL in the same tool."

"The connections with SAP must be improved."

More Fivetran cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is based on DPUs so it is a good idea to optimize use or it can get expensive."

"AWS Glue follows a pay-as-you-go model, wherein the cost of the data you use will be counted as a monthly bill."

"It is not expensive. AWS Glue works on the serverless architecture. We get charged for the time the server is up. For our use case, we have to use it once in a day, and it is not expensive for us."

"This solution is affordable and there is an option to pay for the solution based on your usage."

"AWS Glue uses a pay-as-you-go approach which is helpful. The price of the overall solution is low and is a great advantage."

"AWS Glue is a paid service that doesn't come under the free trial of AWS."

"It is an expensive product. I rate its pricing a nine out of ten."

"I rate pricing an eight out of ten."

More AWS Glue pricing and cost advice

"When you have a lot of workflows and complex use cases, pricing goes down as you use it more."

"The product is reasonably expensive"

"The solution is affordable."

"The pricing model is okay and mid to large companies will not have an issue with it."

"I would say they're a little bit on the expensive side, and their contract process is not particularly good, but there is a lot of potential flexibility."

"Fivetran is very expensive, and its database-driven pricing model is outdated."

"I don't have the exact information, but I know it is high, and it is on a yearly basis. There is no additional cost for what we're doing. We're always open to doing things cheaper, so we might potentially implement a different solution."

"In the first year, we were given a very good discount. It was approximately 20,000 Euros per year. In the third year, we purchased credit for two years and the price was 33,000 Euros per year."

More Fivetran pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Educational Organization

29%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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Product Reports

AWS Glue

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Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Overview

AWS Glue is a serverless cloud data integration tool that facilitates the discovery, preparation, movement, and integration of data from multiple sources for machine learning (ML), analytics, and application development. The solution includes additional productivity and data ops tooling for running jobs, implementing business workflows, and authoring.

AWS Glue allows users to connect to more than 70 diverse data sources and manage data in a centralized data catalog. The solution facilitates visual creation, running, and monitoring of extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines to load data into users' data lakes. This Amazon product seamlessly integrates with other native applications of the brand and allows users to search and query cataloged data using Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

The solution also utilizes application programming interface (API) operations to transform users' data, create runtime logs, store job logic, and create notifications for monitoring job runs. The console of AWS Glue connects all of these services into a managed application, facilitating the monitoring and operational processes. The solution also performs provisioning and management of the resources required to run users' workloads in order to minimize manual work time for organizations.

AWS Glue Features

AWS Glue groups its features into four categories - discover, prepare, integrate, and transform. Within those groups are the following features:

Automatic schema discovery: AWS Glue crawlers connect to the organization's source or target data source through a prioritized list of classifiers to determine the schema for users' data. This feature creates metadata in companies' AWS Glue Data Catalog.
Schemas for data stream management: The AWS Glue Schema Registry enables users to validate and control the evolution of streaming data through registered Apache Avro schemas for no additional charge.
Automatic scaling based on workload: This feature dynamically scales resources up and down based on workload. The feature controls job resources, removing them depending on how much the workload can be split up.
FindMatches: This feature is for machine learning-based data deduplication and cleansing, and works by finding records that are imperfect matches of each other to remove useless data copies.
Edit, debug, and test ETL code: This feature helps users who have chosen to interactively develop their ETL code by providing development endpoints for editing, debugging, and testing the code it generates for them.
AWS Glue DataBrew: An interactive, point-and-click visual interface for specialists to clean and normalize data without the need to write any code.
AWS Glue Interactive Sessions: This feature simplifies the development of data integration jobs by enabling data engineers to interactively prepare and explore data.
AWS Glue Studio Job Notebooks: This AWS Glue feature provides serverless notebooks with minimal setup, allowing developers to start working in a timely manner.
Complex ETL pipeline building: This feature allows the product to be invoked on a schedule, on demand, or based on an event, allowing users to start multiple jobs in parallel or specify dependencies to build complex ETL pipelines.
AWS Glue Studio: This AWS Glue feature allows users to visually transform data through a drag-and-drop interface. The product automatically generates the code for ETL processes for users' data.

AWS Glue Benefits

AWS Glue offers a wide range of benefits for its users. These benefits include:

Users of other AWS products can easily onboard with AWS Glue, as it is integrated across a wide range of the company's services.
The solution is serverless, which allows for a lower total cost of ownership.
AWS Glue offers more power for users, as it automates much of the effort in building, maintaining, and running ETL jobs.
The product allows customers to easily discover and search across all their AWS datasets through AWS Glue Data Catalog.
AWS Glue does not require additional payment for managing and enforcing schemas for data streams.
The solution facilitates the authority of scalable ETL jobs for beginners and non-coding experts through a drag-and-drop interface.

Reviews from Real Users

Mustapha A., a cloud data engineer at Jems Groupe, likes AWS Glue because it is a product that is great for serverless data transformations.

Liana I., CEO at Quark Technologies SRL, describes AWS Glue as a highly scalable, reliable, and beneficial pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Fivetran is a data integration and migration solution that centralizes data from various sources into a data warehouse (such as Snowflake or BigQuery) for analytics. Its most valuable features include replication and managed pipelines, integration with DBT for data transformation, and many source connections.

Fivetran is easy to use, with fast data migration and an intuitive portal for easy setup and troubleshooting. It has helped organizations integrate and manage data, saving time and resources.

Sample Customers

bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday

DocuSign, Oldcastle Infrastructure, Crossmedia, Talkdesk, Chubbies, Brandwatch

AWS Glue vs. Fivetran