The experience of using SDK connectors can be improved, as it lacks computational power, which is an area that needs enhancement. Additionally, for some connections, I want more flexibility during ingestion, specifically for transformations needed beforehand. When we tried to use a built-in Oracle connector, it didn't allow for the tweaks we needed, which led us to the SDK connector route and caused delays in development.
Founder at a marketing services firm with 1-10 employees
Real User
Top 5
May 2, 2025
In our case, we ultimately did not end up using Fivetran because we were able to do custom connects at a lower cost compared to Fivetran. From a cost perspective, if the number of connectors is lesser, then Fivetran is not the most cost-efficient option.
Fivetran could improve by adapting more for technical users and by providing more options for such users. There should be more adaptability in terms of new features. If a specific feature is required, it should be integrated promptly. Improvement in existing connectors with new features is desirable. Enhancements around customer-focused product adaptation are also suggested.
Associate Enterprise Architect(Data Analyst) at Dyson
Real User
Top 10
Nov 7, 2024
There is not a lot of options to customize the pipeline, and the cost is high. Additionally, conducting extractions with transformations, like removing null values or doing simple calculations, is difficult. Vendor support is also slow to respond.
Principal Data Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 5
Oct 8, 2024
The biggest area for improvement is in customization, particularly in how Fivetran socializes its tools. Many features like deploying Fivetran on-premises for security purposes or using connectors specific to systems like SAP are not well communicated. New users might not be aware of these features due to the lack of socialization when there are new releases or updates.
Principal Data Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 5
Oct 8, 2024
Fivetran could improve in the area of customization, especially in how they socialize their tools. The feature of being able to deploy Fivetran on-premises for enhanced security should be highlighted more during discussions with executives.
This solution needs to improve its real-time data and transformation availability. You have to extract a load before you can do any transformation. Another improvement that can be made is with load extraction. This functionality should be implemented with obligating data and data masking.
Principal Data Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 5
Oct 2, 2023
Given that Fivetran is a fully managed third-party solution, 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.
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.
Senior Data Engineer at a photography company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Jul 17, 2023
Fivetran should add more connectors because its competitors, like Airbyte, have more connectors. All of these systems have a problem, namely that they are pure cloud player solutions. I often work in hybrid solutions where customers have on-prem things mixed with cloud things. Pure cloud player solutions never provide a good solution for what is on-prem, which leads to a gap. When you look at systems such as ActiveBatch, they have a very, very strong on-prem platform. They are also looking at the web and cloud things, but they are not that good at the cloud things. So there is nothing that is equally good for both on-prem and cloud. Fivetran should add a feature to connect to the SQL server on-prem.
Associate Data Engineer at a outsourcing company with 201-500 employees
MSP
Feb 20, 2023
The documentation is decent, but it's hard to find information online about Fivetran. For example, if you try to search for an error code, you won't find much information about it in forums. The CI/CD capabilities aren't user-friendly. It's easy for simple tasks, but sometimes I get error codes that aren't well-defined in the system or the documentation. We also experience some lag when migrating between two database sources. Data transformation is expensive, so it's segregated across multiple accounts. It would be helpful if we could unify those into a single transformation component or integrate the solution with other transformation tools. It was built for data replication, not transformation.
Senior Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Nov 30, 2022
More connectors are needed for exotic, popular, and rising star portals. Creating a comprehensive, one-stop shop for bringing data as quickly as possible would improve the solution. If I check a list of data sources, only 10% of new providers are supported by the solution. Most companies want various data sources for processing down the road. We use the solution as a primary source so we have to decide if it will work for a use case or if we will need to create a custom integration. Customer support should be offered via a portal system instead of the current chat platform. In a portal system, it is fairly easy to look back and see the history of your discussion. With a chat platform, once you close a session you have to open a new one. The history is lost and you don't have a record of who you communicated with to receive that advice. For example, I might chat with support today about an issue that recurs tomorrow. My colleague catches up with me to continue work on the issue but I can't share the chat history for further discussion. Chat platforms are not a collaborative tool. A portal system is an elegant way to ensure two-way communication.
Sr. Director of BI and Analytics at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Nov 29, 2022
One of the traditional issues with the platform has been logging. The logging, while they have it, is not particularly verbose, so when there are issues it becomes hard to do. They also have internal logs versus customer-facing logs. We've asked FiveTran to provide more exposure on that or to be able to subscribe to it via an API or Datadog or something like that to pull from their system. Another thing is mainly their breadth of being able to pull from different systems. They have some of this already, but they're pushing to do some integrations with Excel online. 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.
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.
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...
The experience of using SDK connectors can be improved, as it lacks computational power, which is an area that needs enhancement. Additionally, for some connections, I want more flexibility during ingestion, specifically for transformations needed beforehand. When we tried to use a built-in Oracle connector, it didn't allow for the tweaks we needed, which led us to the SDK connector route and caused delays in development.
If Fivetran can build in more transformations, that would be really helpful in my opinion.
In our case, we ultimately did not end up using Fivetran because we were able to do custom connects at a lower cost compared to Fivetran. From a cost perspective, if the number of connectors is lesser, then Fivetran is not the most cost-efficient option.
Fivetran could improve by adapting more for technical users and by providing more options for such users. There should be more adaptability in terms of new features. If a specific feature is required, it should be integrated promptly. Improvement in existing connectors with new features is desirable. Enhancements around customer-focused product adaptation are also suggested.
There is not a lot of options to customize the pipeline, and the cost is high. Additionally, conducting extractions with transformations, like removing null values or doing simple calculations, is difficult. Vendor support is also slow to respond.
The biggest area for improvement is in customization, particularly in how Fivetran socializes its tools. Many features like deploying Fivetran on-premises for security purposes or using connectors specific to systems like SAP are not well communicated. New users might not be aware of these features due to the lack of socialization when there are new releases or updates.
Fivetran could improve in the area of customization, especially in how they socialize their tools. The feature of being able to deploy Fivetran on-premises for enhanced security should be highlighted more during discussions with executives.
This solution needs to improve its real-time data and transformation availability. You have to extract a load before you can do any transformation. Another improvement that can be made is with load extraction. This functionality should be implemented with obligating data and data masking.
Given that Fivetran is a fully managed third-party solution, 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 connections with SAP must be improved. The environment has some limitations.
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 should add more connectors because its competitors, like Airbyte, have more connectors. All of these systems have a problem, namely that they are pure cloud player solutions. I often work in hybrid solutions where customers have on-prem things mixed with cloud things. Pure cloud player solutions never provide a good solution for what is on-prem, which leads to a gap. When you look at systems such as ActiveBatch, they have a very, very strong on-prem platform. They are also looking at the web and cloud things, but they are not that good at the cloud things. So there is nothing that is equally good for both on-prem and cloud. Fivetran should add a feature to connect to the SQL server on-prem.
The solution is very expensive. I would like to have a better integration of the solution with Azure.
The documentation is decent, but it's hard to find information online about Fivetran. For example, if you try to search for an error code, you won't find much information about it in forums. The CI/CD capabilities aren't user-friendly. It's easy for simple tasks, but sometimes I get error codes that aren't well-defined in the system or the documentation. We also experience some lag when migrating between two database sources. Data transformation is expensive, so it's segregated across multiple accounts. It would be helpful if we could unify those into a single transformation component or integrate the solution with other transformation tools. It was built for data replication, not transformation.
More connectors are needed for exotic, popular, and rising star portals. Creating a comprehensive, one-stop shop for bringing data as quickly as possible would improve the solution. If I check a list of data sources, only 10% of new providers are supported by the solution. Most companies want various data sources for processing down the road. We use the solution as a primary source so we have to decide if it will work for a use case or if we will need to create a custom integration. Customer support should be offered via a portal system instead of the current chat platform. In a portal system, it is fairly easy to look back and see the history of your discussion. With a chat platform, once you close a session you have to open a new one. The history is lost and you don't have a record of who you communicated with to receive that advice. For example, I might chat with support today about an issue that recurs tomorrow. My colleague catches up with me to continue work on the issue but I can't share the chat history for further discussion. Chat platforms are not a collaborative tool. A portal system is an elegant way to ensure two-way communication.
One of the traditional issues with the platform has been logging. The logging, while they have it, is not particularly verbose, so when there are issues it becomes hard to do. They also have internal logs versus customer-facing logs. We've asked FiveTran to provide more exposure on that or to be able to subscribe to it via an API or Datadog or something like that to pull from their system. Another thing is mainly their breadth of being able to pull from different systems. They have some of this already, but they're pushing to do some integrations with Excel online. 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.
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.