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: January 2025).

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AWS Glue vs. Fivetran

January 2025

Helped 838,713 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

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

7th

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 February 2025, in the Cloud Data Integration category, the mindshare of AWS Glue is 21.5%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fivetran is 5.5%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Muthuvel Sivaraman

AVP at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Handles a huge volume of data and is serverless, but it can be considered costly by some users

We use Amazon's services to provide technical support for the product. If you want to have support, Oracle and others offer a single support, and other tools have a direct support window. For Amazon, we need to pay 10 percent of my billing amount for the tool to get support services. Whether to raise a support ticket or not is an issue since ten percent is a huge amount. My company ends up using all the options without help from support. It is very difficult for any common man to understand why there is a need to pay ten percent for support. If I find an issue in the product, and I need to get support from AWS to fix it, then I need to pay ten percent of the tool's bill amount to Amazon. AWS is a very tricky tool because everything is evolving nowadays. AWS engineers are getting hired from other places, and even after that, if I am not getting any technical support, then things will be very nasty. There are some good engineers who help users outside the normal support cycle, but it doesn't meet their needs. I rate the technical support a four out of ten.

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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

"AWS Glue is quite better than other tools, but you have to learn it properly before you start using it."

"The solution helps organizations gain flexibility in defining the structure of the data."

"Transformations are valuable because you can modify or override complex data logic from an open source or Spark to solve issues."

"I like that it's flexible, powerful, and allows you to write your own queries and scripts to get the needed transformations."

"It is a stable and scalable solution."

"AWS Glue is very quick to start without cold starts, unlike AWS Lambda."

"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."

"I also like that you can add custom libraries like JAR files and use them. So, the ability to use a fast processing engine and embed basic jobs easily are significant advantages."

More AWS Glue pros

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

"Fivetran offers native connectivity with Sybase"

"There's the general feature of the platform where it just makes it very easy to integrate different things, but I would say a specific difference is their integration of DBT,."

"It is easy for users to get accustomed to the tool due to its gentle learning curve and clear error transparency."

"The simplicity and scalability are the strongest features of Fivetran."

"The portal is very intuitive and easy to use."

"The general data ingestion is valuable. It's used for a lot of data. It provides about 90% of the data we use in our data warehouse without needing data engineering."

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

More Fivetran pros

Cons

"AWS Glue should be more reliable and faster in processing. Enhancing the speed of data processing would be beneficial."

"On occasion, the solution's dashboard reports that a project failed due to runtime but it actually succeeded."

"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 would like to see stable libraries at the moment they are not there."

"The product is expensive for data streaming. This area needs improvement."

"There could be an enhanced way of managing pure metadata management or data cataloging."

"The product has only a few built-in transformations."

"It is very difficult to learn the tool and remember the syntaxes comparatively."

More AWS Glue cons

"Fivetran would be improved by adding the ability to integrate the data from third-party APIs."

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

"This solution needs to improve its real-time data and transformation availability."

"Some of the pain points we're looking at are trying to integrate some of the items in the Microsoft stack, so SharePoint and Excel, and then some of the newer Azure services."

"The documentation can be laid out better to make it easier to find things, and I really wish there was built-in support for changing passwords. Some features don't work as advertised for the platform/repository database, and HVR is not always the fastest at getting results."

"The interface needs to be more user-friendly."

"The customization could improve because Fivetran gives more thought to people who don't want to manage analytics workflows rather than engineers who want to be able to customize pipelines more thoroughly."

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

More Fivetran cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate pricing an eight out of ten."

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

"I rate the tool an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is expensive."

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

"The overall cost of AWS Glue could be better. It cost approximately $1,000 a month. There is paid support available from AWS Glue."

"Technical support is a paid service, and which subscription you have is dependent on that. You must pay one of them, and it ranges from $15,000 to $25,000 per year."

"I rate the product's pricing a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."

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

More AWS Glue pricing and cost advice

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

"The licensing costs are extremely high for the usage of somebody who has one GB or two GB of usage per day for real-time traffic. There are many other players in the market which are similarly priced or competitively priced. On average per month, it used to come around 12,000-15,000 USD, which is very high."

"I rate the pricing a six out of ten."

"I've heard that the license for HVR is a bit costly compared to its competitors, but since it's reliable and efficient, I think the customer shouldn't be bothered about the cost."

"I can't give exact amounts because that's based on usage, but it's more expensive than some of its competitors."

"The product is reasonably expensive"

"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."

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

More Fivetran pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Educational Organization

30%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

How do you select the right cloud ETL tool?

AWS Glue and Azure Data factory for ELT best performance cloud services.

How does Talend Open Studio compare with AWS Glue?

We reviewed AWS Glue before choosing Talend Open Studio. AWS Glue is the managed ETL (extract, transform, and load) from Amazon Web Services. AWS Glue enables AWS users to create and manage jobs in...

What are the most common use cases for AWS Glue?

AWS Glue's main use case is for allowing users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources. The product lets you use this data for analytics, application development, or ma...

What's the deal with the HVR software acquisition?

As a user of HVR Software I followed this deal closely. Fivetran is apparently trying to establish more in its sector and by buying an already established data replication software, they become som...

Does HVR Software provide reliable insights?

I honestly can't think of another data replication software that can give you better statistics and insight than HVR Software. There's the feature for topology and statistics and both of them can ...

How much traffic can HVR Software handle?

As someone who works at a company where a high volume of information is replicated and has tried several data replication softwares, I can tell you that you're looking at the right one. HVR Softwar...

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Compared 16% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Download AWS Glue product report

AWS Glue

February 2025

Download Fivetran product report

February 2025

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.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Fivetran, the global leader in data movement, is trusted by companies like OpenAI, LVMH, Pfizer, Verizon and Spotify to centralize data from SaaS applications, databases, files, and other sources into cloud destinations, including data lakes. With high-performance pipelines, seamless interoperability, and enterprise-grade security, Fivetran empowers organizations to modernize their data infrastructure, power analytics and AI, ensure compliance, and achieve transformative business outcomes. Learn more at Fivetran.com

Sample Customers

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

Autodesk, Condé Nast, JetBlue, Morgan Stanley, OpenAI, LVMH, Pfizer, Verizon, SpotifyNational Australia Bank, Saks, Cemex, Okta, Dropbox, Pitney Bowes, World Fuel Services,Lufthansa, AutoZone, ASICS, ASOS, Coupa, Databricks, Hermes, New Relic, Intercom,Canva, Honeywell, Square, DocuSign, Nandos, Oldcastle Infrastructure