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Find out the very best ETL tools that will allow you to automate data extraction, transformation and loading - each with its top features.
Today’s world runs on data and no matter what kind of business you run, there is a good chance you have huge volumes of data. The problem? In its raw form, that data is not very useful. To interpret and analyze that data, it needs to be transformed into a usable format. This is where ETL tools come in.
ETL tools have become an indispensable part of many businesses and their operations today. As the industry gets more crowded, choosing the right ETL tool can become a challenge. Today, we’re going to show you a list of the very best ETL tools and explain what makes each one stand out.
But first…
ETL stands for extract, transform and load, and this is exactly what happens with your data. This is what an ETL process works like:
The main role of ETL tools is to gather the data from a large variety of sources, transform it into a format that can be used later on, and then analyze that cloud data in your favorite BI tools to get actionable insights.
There are many use cases in which an ETL solution will come in handy, from data warehousing to business intelligence, data migration and data integration.
PS. Many modern business users prefer ELT to ETL because the data is transformed simultaneously as it is being loaded. This functionality makes the entire process much quicker.
There are many different types of ETL tools to optimize your data pipeline. Which one is best for you will depend heavily on your data transformation needs. Let’s look at the most common types to help you navigate the options.
Don’t want to host and maintain your own on-premise data infrastructure? Go for a cloud-based ETL tool: they are connective, high-performance, and often cost-efficient. The most popular cloud services like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure have ETL tools built into their offering. The only drawback is that you’ll be limited to that specific cloud provider.
If you’re tech-savvy and you want more control over your data pipelines and ETL processes, open-source ETL tools are a great choice. Not only are they often free to use, but they also come with a community of developers to ask for help.
Although they are the most expensive, enterprise software ETL tools are robust tools fit for larger enterprises with deep pockets. With graphical user interfaces, metadata management, and great connectivity to relational and non-relational databases, they are very comprehensive but require some training.
If you have very specific requirements, you may choose to code your own ETL and data pipelines. Using popular programming languages like Python, Java or SQL, these tools will give you the most freedom, but also take the most effort.
If it matters a great deal to you that new data is immediately available for decision-making, real-time ETL tools are the way to go. They are great for businesses with streaming data like fraud detection, IT monitoring or inventory control.
If it’s OK to have some delay in new data entering your systems, batch-processing ETL tools are a better alternative. As the name says, they process data in batches at regular intervals. These are a great fit for businesses with huge amounts of data to process.
There is no single best ETL tool - each one is unique when it comes to data management, transformation, and loading. However, there are some common traits that every good ETL tool should have.
Having said this, carefully consider the tool you choose and weigh out all of these factors before committing to one provider. If you value flexibility, it’s a good idea to look into open-source ETL tools.
In recent years, ELT has become increasingly popular over ETL. The acronym stands for extract, load and transform. But it’s not just the reversed order of the letters.
In ELT, the raw data is loaded directly to the destination, and the destination tool takes care of the transforming. The process is quicker and the raw data is accessible at all times in the destination for further processing.
In our list below, we include a few ELT tools besides the ETL ones, since they both have the goal of transforming raw unstructured data into the right format, but do so in a different way.
These tools are not ranked in numerical order. However, we specifically chose these tools as we recommend them to Luzmo customers who want a reliable, fast, and easy-to-use ETL tool.
This tool is more than an ETL - dbt is an SQL-based transformation workflow for engineering teams that want to deploy analytics code easily, following engineering best practices.
For businesses with a heavy focus on data governance, this platform has a lot to offer. You can standardize your data, as well as access and roles, making sure that only high quality transformations make it to the production stage.
It’s more modern than most other tools on this list, for a few reasons. It’s SQL-based, which means it’s pretty standardized and your developers won’t need to learn another programming language just to find their way around dbt.
They also have git-based version control. This means that you can track who in your team made edits and when and backtrack if necessary.
Price: there is a free trial available; paid plans start at $100 per month.
While its competitors call themselves ETL, Fivetran refers to their company as an automated data platform. Another way it stands out is that Fivetran only charges for the data you use - i.e. monthly active rows (MAR).
You can get data to Fivetran from a large variety of sources: data warehouses, data lakes, databases, enterprise apps, and many others. There are over 300 connectors, and adding them to your data movement platform does not require any knowledge of coding.
With 99.9% uptime and 24/7 support, this is a reliable platform for enterprise users who need constant real-time access to their data. It also adjusts very easily to schema changes, meaning your data integrity will stay intact.
PS. We also use Fivetran internally for our own projects!
Price: a free plan is available. Paid plans are based on usage, and the cheapest one starts at $36 per month for 40k MAR.
This data warehouse solution offers ETL as a feature, among others. With 205+ data sources, Panoply promises to deliver results 30x faster, 50% cheaper, and all of that with no code.
Unlike most tools on this list, Panoply offers an additional step after you load data - you can visualize your data within the tool too. However, if you’re looking for more extensive graphical visualization capabilities, you can export the data to a visualization tool of your choice - such as Luzmo.
Price: there is a free trial available. Paid plans start at $299 per month for 10 million rows of data.
This IPaaS platform offers ETL as a part of its feature set. Tray.io sets out to solve a major pain point for businesses: the ability to connect and transform data without a data engineer in sight - just low-code tools for building workflows.
Thanks to its serverless architecture, Tray.io facilitates scalability as you can handle an unlimited data volume if need be.
Price: there is no publicly disclosed pricing, but online sources state that paid plans start from $595 per month.
There is no better social proof than the sheer volume of users, and with 40,000 of them using Airbyte, this open source tool is a force to be reckoned with.
If your data comes from various sources, Airbyte might be the best choice for your needs. At the time of writing, it supports over 300 different connectors. And if you don’t see a connector you need, simply create it yourself using their no-code connector builder. Want to edit an existing connector to handle complex data? You can do that too.
You can use Airbyte in the cloud or as a self-hosted tool.
PS. We built our own connector from Airbyte to Luzmo - where you can use Luzmo to visualize the data from Airbyte.
Price: starts at $2.50/credit for Airbyte cloud. For the self-hosted version, you need to reach out to sales to get a quote.
For businesses looking to cover all of their needs with one tool, Mozart Data may be a great choice. This ETL platform offers data warehouses, data transformation, and much more, making it a great all-rounder.
Like Airbyte, Mozart is a cloud platform that promises a large number of data sources (400+) and rapid fast deployment - so you can finish the data centralization process in mere minutes.
Combined data sets from multiple places and centralize it in one place, so that you can spend more time analyzing data and not worrying about data formats. Once your analysis is ready, you can share it with your team by exporting it in an Excel sheet.
Price: there is a free trial giving you 500,000 monthly data rows. Paid plans start at $1,000 + 1,000 for implementation.
If ease of use is your main concern, Stitch is a data integration platform that allows you to pull data from over 130 sources without writing a single line of code. Stitch is open source and it updates automatically and continuously, without you lifting a finger. This means a constant flow of data ready for analysis.
With great uptime and SOC2, GDPR and HIPAA certification, it’s a logical choice for enterprise businesses that put value on reliability, while the great user interface comes as a nice extra. They offer different ways of data replication, which ensures the highest data availability.
As a side note, Stitch was recently acquired by Talend (you’ll find them further down this list), which means that Stitch is also enterprise-ready.
Price: there is a free trial and paid plans start at $100 and scale upwards based on the number of data rows you need.
Just like Amazon (which we’ll cover in a minute), Microsoft has its own ETL offering, suitable for users with different needs. Besides the ETL workloads, Azure Data Factory lets customers perform a wide range of operations on data pipelines, such as designing, scheduling, and monitoring.
It does not have as many connectors as some of its competitors (just 90 at the time of writing), but it packs a mighty punch. Azure customers can use it as a no-code platform or use the command base to write their own code.
Price: depends on data flow orchestration, runtime, and many other factors. It’s best to do your own research before committing.
This serverless data management tool is built by Amazon and it is ideal for big data analytics. If you’re already in the AWS framework and you’re looking for a painless way to extract data, transfer and load it, AWS Glue is a logical choice.
Customers who have tried it out state that although it’s powerful with its data processing and serverless capabilities, AWS Glue is not great when it comes to flexibility. For this reason, it is better suited for existing AWS customers.
Price: depends on many different factors, so it’s best to head to their pricing page to get a precise quote.
For businesses looking for reliability, high performance, and a wealth of features, Informatica Powercenter is an ETL solution that fits the bill. It connects to a good number of sources, such as Salesforce, Google Cloud, Azure, and others.
On the flip side, this is a tool known for its complexity and steep learning curve. Unless you have a team of data scientists on board and you’re embedded in the Informatica ecosystem, it’s better to look elsewhere.
Price: not disclosed publicly.
Another enterprise-level competitor in the arena joins the ranks of Microsoft and Amazon. If you’re using other Oracle tools, you’re already in the ecosystem and Oracle Data Integrator is the logical choice for an ETL tool… Or is it?
Unlike the other tools on this list, ODI primarily focuses on ELT rather than ETL, which may be a pro or a con for your use cases. Also, it’s definitely on the more difficult side when it comes to learning the tool and getting up to speed. However, it has a large number of connectors, for sources such as Hadoop, NoSQL databases, XML, JSON, CRM tools, and many others.
Price: it’s best to use their price estimator to get the most precise quote.
Integrate is one of the most popular ETL choices today, thanks to a wide variety of factors. It is effortless to use and comes packed with great connectors: Amazon Redshift, MySQL, Google Cloud, and many others.
It’s a cloud-based tool by default, which may not suit businesses looking for an on-premise tool. However, rest assured that your data is safe, thanks to its Field Level Encryption.
Price: there is a free trial available. For ETL and reverse ETL, pricing starts at $15,000 per year.
One of the most popular ETL tools today, Talend offers solutions for both cloud-based and on-premises data integration needs. There are two versions of the tool, the paid data integration platform and Talend Open Studio, the open-source variant for smaller, less demanding, but data-driven businesses.
It’s also relatively easy to use, thanks to its drag-and-drop functionality.
It has a wide range of features for businesses of all sizes, from rapid implementation to robust data governance capabilities. It also makes it effortless to maintain data quality, thanks to a wide range of procedures such as cleansing, deduplication (removing data duplicates), and profiling.
Price: starts at $1,170 per user.
Pentaho (previously known as Kettle) is an open-source platform owned by Hitachi Vantara and it allows businesses of all sizes to ingest, integrate, and analyze their data.
If you’re big into AI and IoT tools, Pentaho will be right up your alley. Thanks to its open source nature, it allows connecting the tool to IoT tools, so you can use machine learning to derive insights after data analysis.
Ease of use is one of this tool’s strongest selling points.
Price: you can grab the tool for free in its Community version or purchase the Enterprise edition - but you have to get in touch to get a quote.
If you're running an e-commerce business, you will want to have a look at Saras Analytics. They offer a unified data platform, geared specifically towards commerce businesses. Their data suite comes with an ETL layer, Daton, with over 200 data connectors to choose from.
If you're looking to pull data from niche marketplaces or commerce platforms, chances are best you'll find them in Saras Analytics. If you're an Amazon seller, you'll be amazed by the amount of Amazon connectors!
Besides their focus on e-commerce, Daton is best known for being no-code, low-maintenance, and great for data consistency.
Price: pricing depends on how much data you have, starting at $95/month for 5 million rows of data
This list wouldn't be complete without having tech giant IBM on it. IBM’s DataStage is a powerful ETL tool, especially for enterprise-level businesses dealing with large volumes of data.
If you’re a fan of visual programming, you’ll like DataStage’s graphical interface to design your ETL pipelines.
Although Apache Airflow is not technically an ETL tool, it still deserves a spot on this list. It is primarily a workflow orchestration tool. If you need to manage complex workflows, and ETL tasks are only part of it, you’ll want to consider using this open-source tool.
It has strong integrations with many ETL tools, and a big open-source community that creates new plugins and integrations for different data sources frequently. It’s the perfect choice for developers who want to define their workflows using Python scripts.
Price: you can use Airflow for free under its open source license.
If you need any type of real-time, or just want to improve your change data capture (CDC), you’re probably going to look at Estuary Flow. Unlike other ELT or ETL vendors, Estuary Flow can stream data at just about any scale and any speed, from sub-100ms real-time to hour+ intervals, from a source to Estuary, and from Estuary to each destination.
It stores each stream transactionally as a durable log during streaming. This improves reliability and enables mixing real-time and batch, sending to multiple destinations, backfilling, and time travel without having to re-extract from sources. It also supports ELT (dbt) and streaming ETL (SQL, TypeScript).
Many companies adopt Estuary first for CDC. It is the only product that immediately starts reading the transaction log, streams incremental snapshots, and commits both as a real-time stream log for reuse in real-time or batch. This puts the least strain on the source and lets you load or backfill in batch or real-time. It not only supports all data major cloud warehouses. It also supports databases and other real-time destinations.
Price: There is free plan available; paid plan start at $1/GB
Going from unstructured data to useful business intelligence data requires choosing the ideal ETL tool for your data integration process. Today, we’ve given you a roundup of some of the very best data integration tools that we personally recommend to our customers - hope it makes your job of choosing much easier.
And once you have clean, structured data, it’s time to visualize it so you can get actionable insights. We can help with that! With Luzmo, you can visualize your data for yourself or your customers and get to insights, rapidly fast.
Grab your free trial today to get started!
Build your first embedded data product now. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
