In today’s increasingly data-driven world, businesses need reliable and efficient ways to collect, analyze, and draw insights from their data. With so many data integration tools available in the market, it can be difficult to determine which one is the best fit for your organization.
Fivetran, a cloud-based automated data integration platform, has emerged as a leading choice among businesses looking for an easy and cost-effective way to unify their data from various sources.
In this blog, we will explore what Fivetran is and how it works, as well as dive into its pricing structure to help you make an informed decision on whether or not Fivetran is the right platform for your data integration needs.
What is Fivetran?
Fivetran is an automated data integration platform that offers a convenient solution for businesses to consolidate and sync data from disparate data sources. With over 160 data connectors available, Fivetran makes it easy to move data out of, into, and across any cloud data platform in the market.
Examples of data sources and destinations include:
- Shopify
- Google Analytics
- Snowflake Data Cloud
- Oracle
- Salesforce
Fivetran’s mission is to, “make access to data as easy as electricity” – so for the last 10 years, they have developed their platform into a leader in the cloud-based ELT market.
What is Fivetran Used For?
Fivetran is used by businesses to centralize data from various sources into a single, comprehensive data warehouse. It allows organizations to easily connect their disparate data sources without having to manage any infrastructure.
Fivetran’s automated data movement platform simplifies the ETL (extract, transform, load) process by automating most of the time-consuming tasks of ETL that data engineers would typically do. From automatic data updates to automated schema replication, Fivetran does it all without requiring any code from users.
By using Fivetran, businesses can reduce the time and resources required for data integration, enabling them to focus on extracting insights from the data rather than managing the ELT process.
Why Use Fivetran?
Building data pipelines manually is an expensive and time-consuming process. The real value of a data pipeline is its output, not the creation and maintenance that goes into it. Listed below are a few of the ways that Fivetran helps organizations save time and money when building pipelines.
“Ingestion is a heavy tax that doesn’t solve business problems”
– Mac Noland (phData Founder)
Reduces Time Spent on Ingestion Pipeline Creation, Maintenance, Reliability, and Scalability
Fivetran automates the data integration process, reducing the time and effort required to manage data movement from different sources into your data warehouse. This can save your organization significant time and money compared to manual data integration methods. This automation minimizes the points of failure your team will be required to manage, allowing your team to spend more time using and refining data.
Simplifying Change Management and Increasing Delivery Velocity
With fewer moving parts for your team to manage, change management becomes simpler and allows your teams to tighten their delivery cycles, fix bugs faster, and add additional features more often. This makes the business more agile, improving its ability to accurately monitor and respond to changes in the market using data.
Additionally, Fivetran supports compliance with data privacy regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPPA with built-in features like data encryption and masking to ensure that sensitive data is protected throughout its lifecycle.
Fast and Simple Centralizing of Many Different Data Sources Into a Single Cloud-Based Target (i.e. Snowflake)
Fivetran supports over 150 data sources, including popular databases, applications, and cloud platforms such as Salesforce, Google Analytics, SQL Server, Snowflake, and more. It uses high-performance connectors and cloud-based infrastructure to ensure that data is loaded quickly and reliably into your data warehouse, making it easy for organizations to integrate data from multiple sources.
How Much Does Fivetran Cost?
The answer to that question is, it depends. Fivetran’s pricing model is based on consumption, requiring users to pay solely for what they use. Consumption is calculated based on the number of Monthly Active Rows (MAR) used across all connectors and destination sources.
MAR, simply defined, is the count of all rows inserted, updated, or deleted by Fivetran in a given month. For more information and examples of the MAR calculation, see the official documentation here.
Different Pricing Plans
Users can use the pricing calculator on Fivetran’s website (screenshot shown below) to get an estimate on what their monthly cost would be based on their usage and the pricing plan that they choose.
Fivetran Pricing Examples
Starter
Customers in this range typically spend between $500-$2k per month.
To get to this amount we make the following assumptions:
- 1-10 Users
- 1-10 Million monthly active rows (MAR) consumed
- Under 50 GB of data
Standard
Customers in this range typically spend between $3k-$7k per month.
To get to this amount we make the following assumptions:
- 10-50 Users
- 10-50 Million monthly active rows (MAR) consumed
- Under 1 TB of data
Enterprise
Customers in this range typically spend between $8k-$15k per month.
To get to this amount we make the following assumptions:
- 50-100+ users
- 50-100 Million monthly active rows (MAR) consumed
- Under 5 TB of data
Of course, we have seen larger Fivetran customers whose data ingestion needs surpass the examples listed above, these certainly require larger budgets, but these are typically more mature customers that have been working with Fivetran for multiple years.
How Does Fivetran’s Costs Change Over Time?
One of the benefits of using Fivetran is its unique pricing model. As more unique data gets synced per billing period, the cheaper the incremental cost per unique monthly active row is. This means that as businesses’ data needs scale up, they won’t be faced with steeply increasing costs.
Conclusion
Fivetran is an industry-leader in the data movement platform market, providing a wide range of features that make building an ELT process easy. Their transparent pricing model ensures users are only charged for what they use, making Fivetran an affordable solution for businesses of all sizes.
At phData, we regularly use Fivetran for data ingestion as a part of our data migration projects. We lean on Fivetran because we can trust that the data will be accurate and delivered in a timely manner, and because Fivetran automates tedious, time-consuming tasks. This frees up our data engineers to do what they do best.
If you are looking for help with any data engineering projects or curious about how to best leverage Fivetran, reach out to us today! We’re happy to provide guidance and answer any questions.
