13 Best Fivetran Alternatives in 2026 (Compared, With Pricing)

Updated October 22, 2026.

Fivetran is a strong managed ELT product, and in 2026 it is a different company than the one most teams signed up with: the merger with dbt Labs closed in June 2026, pricing moved to a per-connection cost curve with a $5 monthly base charge on every standard connection, and transformations are metered in model runs. Teams look for a Fivetran alternative for three reasons: Monthly Active Rows (MAR) bills that grow faster than the business, the need for transformations inside the pipeline rather than in a separate dbt project, and operational use cases (reverse ETL, bi-directional Salesforce sync, file ingestion) that an ELT loader was never designed for.

This guide compares 13 Fivetran alternatives on pricing model, published entry price, transformation depth, CDC and reverse ETL support and deployment options. Every price below comes from the vendor's own pricing page as of October 2026.

Key Takeaways

• Fivetran's 2026 pricing bills each connection on its own cost curve with a $5 monthly base charge per standard connection, a 500,000 MAR free plan, and 5,000 free model runs a month for transformations. The dbt Labs merger closed in June 2026.
• Integrate.io is the fixed-fee option: $1,999 a month for unlimited data volume, pipelines and connectors, with 220+ in-pipeline transformations, 60-second CDC and reverse ETL on the same plan.
• Airbyte and Meltano are the open-source routes (free to self-host; Airbyte Cloud from $20 a month, Meltano Cloud on quote). Stitch ($100 a month) and Hevo ($265 a month on annual billing) are the cheapest managed entry points.
• Estuary ($0.50 per GB plus $100 per connector) and Rivery (now part of Boomi, from $0.9 per credit) are the usage-based choices for streaming and CDC-heavy loads.
• Matillion, Qlik Talend Cloud and AWS Glue are consumption-priced on quote or per DPU-hour and suit warehouse-native or AWS-native engineering teams.
• Improvado, Hightouch and Polytomic are specialists (marketing data, reverse ETL, combined ETL plus reverse ETL) rather than general Fivetran replacements.

Quick Comparison of Fivetran Alternatives

Prices are from each vendor's pricing page, checked October 2026. "Quote" means the vendor publishes no price.

How We Evaluated These Tools

Integrate.io is listed first because it is the only fixed-fee option on the list with transformations, CDC and reverse ETL on one plan. For every tool we checked the same things:

• Pricing model and entry price: what is metered (rows, events, credits, GB, compute hours) and what the vendor publishes. Unpublished prices are marked "quote", not estimated.
• Transformation depth: whether data can be transformed in the pipeline, or only after loading through dbt or SQL in the warehouse.
• CDC and reverse ETL: whether log-based change data capture and warehouse-to-application sync are included, and on which plan.
• Deployment and compliance: self-hosted, cloud, BYOC or hybrid options, and the certifications on the vendor's security page.
• Migration effort: connector overlap with Fivetran, and what it takes to move existing pipelines.

Facts were taken from vendor pricing, security and documentation pages in October 2026. We do not use review-site scores.

What Changed at Fivetran in 2026, and Why Teams Look Elsewhere

Fivetran's pricing page now lists four plans: Free (up to 500,000 MAR a month, 3,500 activation MAR and 5,000 model runs), Standard (15-minute syncs), Enterprise (1-minute syncs, SCIM, hybrid deployment) and Business Critical (customer-managed keys, PCI DSS Level 1, private networking). Each connection is billed on its own cost curve, so the volume discount a large account used to get across all connectors now applies connection by connection, and every standard connection with between 1 and 1 million MAR carries a $5 monthly base charge. Transformations are metered in model runs: 5,000 are free each month, then $0.01 per run falling to $0.002 at scale. Our Fivetran pricing guide works through what this means at 10, 25 and 50 million rows a month.

The dbt Labs merger, completed in June 2026, makes Fivetran the natural home for teams that already run ELT plus dbt. It also means the transformation layer is now a metered product from the same vendor, which is one of the reasons teams that want transformations inside the pipeline start comparing alternatives. The other common triggers:

• MAR bills that outgrow the budget as event tables, history-mode rows and semi-structured sources expand.
• Operational workloads such as two-way Salesforce sync, file ingestion from clients and partners, and pushing warehouse data back into applications.
• Control over deployment: self-hosted, BYOC or regional hosting for compliance, or just the ability to build a custom connector without a vendor ticket.
• Support that answers in minutes rather than days, without an Enterprise tier.

The 13 Best Fivetran Alternatives in 2026

1. Integrate.io: The Best Overall Alternative for Comprehensive Data Integration

Integrate.io is a low-code data pipeline platform that covers ETL, ELT, CDC and reverse ETL on one flat fee. It is the most complete Fivetran alternative on this list because it replaces the whole stack a Fivetran customer usually runs, not just the loader: ingestion, in-pipeline transformation, CDC replication, warehouse-to-application sync and monitoring, on a single plan with no usage meter. Where Fivetran loads raw data and leaves transformation to metered model runs, Integrate.io transforms in the pipeline with 220+ drag-and-drop components, SQL and Python, so the warehouse receives clean, joined, deduplicated data.

Best for: teams that want a predictable bill and need more than extract-and-load: operational ETL, bi-directional Salesforce sync, file ingestion from SFTP, cloud storage and email, CDC replication without an Enterprise tier, and a support team that answers in minutes. It suits data engineers who want to stop maintaining dbt projects for routine cleanup, and ops and analytics teams who need to build and own pipelines without writing code.

Why it is the best overall Fivetran alternative

• Fixed-fee, unlimited pricing: one monthly price regardless of rows, pipelines or connectors. No MAR, credits, per-connection base charges or model-run overages, so the bill in month twelve is the bill in month one.
• 220+ transformations in the pipeline: joins, aggregations, dedupe, masking, lookups, pivots, window functions and custom SQL or Python, without a separate dbt project or a transformation meter.
• CDC every 60 seconds with automatic schema mapping, on the standard plan rather than gated behind an enterprise tier.
• Reverse ETL and Salesforce in both directions: REST and Bulk API 2.0, insert, update, upsert and delete, External ID matching and primary-key chunking for large objects, so the same platform that loads the warehouse pushes clean data back into Salesforce, NetSuite, HubSpot and other operational systems.
• 150+ connectors plus a REST API source for anything with an API, and a platform API to create packages, trigger jobs, export pipelines as JSON and embed connectors programmatically.
• File and client data ingestion: CSV, Excel, XML, JSON and fixed-width files from SFTP, cloud storage and email, with validation and schema handling in the pipeline.
• Built-in alerts and monitoring at package, workspace and account level, delivered to email, Slack, Teams, PagerDuty or webhook, without a separate observability tool.
• AI where it saves time: Helm, the in-product copilot for building and debugging pipelines, and an MCP Server so agents such as Claude and Cursor can create and run pipelines.
• 24/7 support on every plan with a 2-minute average first response and a 92% customer satisfaction score, not an enterprise add-on.
• Security and compliance: annual SOC 2 audit, HIPAA with a BAA, GDPR (EU processing in Ireland) and CCPA, SSH tunnels, reverse SSH and PrivateLink, a CISSP-certified security team, and a pass-through architecture: no customer data is stored, and ephemeral data is deleted within 24 hours.

Pricing

The Core plan is $1,999 a month with unlimited data volume, unlimited pipelines and unlimited connectors, 60-second pipeline frequency and 30-day onboarding with a dedicated Solution Engineer. There is no row count to forecast, no credit to top up and no per-connection charge. Against Fivetran's per-connection cost curves this is usually the cheaper option for any team past a few million rows a month, and the pricing page shows the comparison with its assumptions. The 14-day free trial includes the full platform and needs no card.

Integration capabilities

Connectors cover CRMs, ERPs, databases, data warehouses, cloud storage, marketing platforms and file sources, and the REST API source reaches anything with an API. Pipelines run on a schedule down to 60 seconds, on a trigger from the platform API, or from an agent through the MCP Server. Destinations include Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks, Azure Synapse and the major relational databases, plus the operational applications used for reverse ETL.

Transformation power

This is the biggest practical difference from Fivetran. Fivetran customers typically add dbt Cloud seats or Fivetran's metered model runs to transform data after it lands. Integrate.io transforms during transit: the visual designer handles joins, filters, aggregations, deduplication, masking and type conversions with no code, SQL components handle anything set-based, and Python components handle custom logic. Technical and non-technical users build on the same canvas, which is why ops teams can own pipelines that would otherwise wait on data engineering.

Switching from Fivetran

Teams under a Fivetran contract can use the Fivetran migration program, which pairs a migration tool that recreates existing pipelines with a Solution Engineer for the 30-day onboarding and a contract buyout for the remaining term. Connector overlap is high for mainstream sources, so most pipelines move rather than get rebuilt, and transformations that lived in dbt can be moved into the pipeline or kept in the warehouse, whichever the team prefers.

2. Airbyte

Airbyte is the open-source ELT platform with the largest community connector catalog (700+), and the most common answer when the question is "what is the free Fivetran alternative". Airbyte Core is free to self-host; Airbyte Cloud bills in credits that vary by source type.

Best for: engineering teams that can run infrastructure and want control over connectors, including building their own with the connector builder, or a BYOC and hybrid deployment with Enterprise Flex.

Limitations: transformations happen after loading, through dbt or SQL in the warehouse, so it is not an ETL tool. Self-hosting means you own upgrades, scaling and connector quality, which varies across community connectors. There is no reverse ETL.

Pricing: Core is free to self-host. Standard starts at $20 a month (5 credits, about 1 GB of syncs). Plus starts at $189 a month for 40 credits, with packages up to 2,000 credits at $4,999 a month. Pro and Enterprise Flex are capacity-priced on Data Workers, on quote. The 14-day trial includes 400 credits. See our Airbyte pricing breakdown and Fivetran vs Airbyte.

3. Hevo Data

Hevo Data is a no-code ELT platform priced on events rather than rows, with a free plan and a Starter tier that undercuts most managed competitors. It appeals to small and mid-size teams that want pipelines running in an afternoon.

Best for: teams with modest, predictable volumes that want a managed service with a free tier for evaluation and a low-cost first paid tier.

Limitations: events above the plan quota are billed on demand, so a spike shows up on the invoice. The Free plan runs on a 1-hour schedule and has no dbt integration. Transformations are lighter than a full ETL tool, and advanced features such as streaming pipelines and VPC peering sit on the Business Critical plan.

Pricing: Free up to 1 million events a month for up to 5 users. Starter from $265 a month billed annually (5M to 50M events, 170+ connectors). Professional from $750 a month billed annually (20M to 100M events, all connectors, Hevo APIs). Business Critical on quote. See Hevo Data pricing and Fivetran vs Hevo.

4. Matillion

Matillion's Data Productivity Cloud is a warehouse-native ELT platform for Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and Redshift, now fronted by Maia, its agentic layer for building and maintaining pipelines. Transformations run as push-down SQL in the warehouse, with Python and Git built in.

Best for: technical teams already standardized on one cloud warehouse who want transformation and orchestration in the same tool as ingestion, and are comfortable with consumption pricing.

Limitations: no published prices; everything is sold on credits (task hours plus extra developer seats) through sales. Streaming CDC, custom SSO and hybrid deployment are on the Scale edition only. It is a transformation-first tool, so teams that need operational sync or reverse ETL will pair it with something else.

Pricing: Developer, Teams and Scale editions, consumption-based on credits, quote only; each edition has a free trial. See Matillion pricing and Fivetran vs Matillion.

5. Stitch

Stitch, now a Qlik product, is the straightforward extract-and-load service built on the Singer open standard. It does one thing, loads data into a warehouse on a schedule, at a price small teams can start with.

Best for: small teams with a handful of SaaS sources and modest row counts who want the cheapest managed loader and do not need transformations.

Limitations: no transformations, limited CDC, and the Standard plan is capped at 10 standard sources and one destination. Enterprise sources need the Advanced or Premium plan, which jump to $1,500 and $3,000 a month.

Pricing: Standard from $100 a month (5 million to 300 million rows, 10 standard sources, 1 destination, 5 users). Advanced $1,500 a month billed annually (100 million rows, unlimited enterprise sources, 3 destinations). Premium $3,000 a month billed annually (1 billion rows, 5 destinations). 14-day trial, no card. See Stitch pricing and Fivetran vs Stitch.

6. Estuary Flow

Estuary Flow is a streaming-first data integration platform: CDC from databases and SaaS sources with sub-minute latency, exactly-once delivery, and derivations in SQL or TypeScript. It is the tool most often named when the requirement is real-time rather than batch.

Best for: teams where data freshness drives the use case (operational dashboards, fraud, inventory) and who want CDC without the Enterprise-tier gating other vendors apply.

Limitations: the per-GB plus per-connector model rewards narrow, frequent changes and punishes wide backfills; cost modelling takes work. Private and BYOC deployments need an annual Enterprise contract. Transformations are developer-oriented rather than drag-and-drop.

Pricing: Developer plan free up to 10 GB a month and 2 connector instances. Cloud at $0.50 per GB moved plus $100 per connector a month (connectors after the sixth are $50), with a 30-day trial. Enterprise on quote with volume discounts, SOC 2 and HIPAA reports, SSO and custom SLAs. See Estuary vs Integrate.io.

7. Improvado

Improvado is a marketing data platform rather than a general ELT tool: 1,400+ marketing, advertising and sales sources, pre-built marketing data models, and an AI agent layer for analysis. Marketing teams that would otherwise stack Fivetran with a separate marketing ETL often consolidate here.

Best for: marketing and revenue teams consolidating ad platforms, analytics and CRM data into one model, where the buyer is marketing operations rather than data engineering.

Limitations: plans are annual and start at $20,000 a year, with daily syncs on the lower tiers. It is not built for database replication, operational ETL or file ingestion outside marketing.

Pricing: MCP Only $100 a month (2 million rows a year). Starter from $20,000 a year (20 million rows). Growth from $50,000 a year (60 to 200 million rows, up to 10 workspaces). Enterprise on quote (1 billion rows). All connectors are included on every plan.

8. Qlik Talend Cloud

Talend has been part of Qlik since 2023 and the cloud product is now Qlik Talend Cloud, which combines Talend's integration, data quality and governance tooling with Qlik's replication (the former Attunity and Qlik Replicate engines). Talend Data Fabric remains available as a client-managed product.

Best for: large organizations that need integration, data quality, lineage and governance in one contract, with hybrid and on-premises connectivity.

Limitations: no published prices, capacity-based billing that combines data volume, job executions and execution duration, and an implementation effort closer to an enterprise platform than a self-serve tool.

Pricing: Starter, Standard, Premium and Enterprise tiers, all on quote; a free trial is available. See Talend pricing and Talend alternatives.

9. Rivery (now part of Boomi)

Boomi announced its acquisition of Rivery in December 2024, and Rivery's credits are now called Boomi Data Units, with documentation on Boomi's help site. The product is still sold at rivery.io as a cloud ELT platform with ingestion, SQL and Python logic steps, orchestration and reverse ETL.

Best for: teams that want ELT, orchestration and reverse ETL together, can batch workloads to control credit spend, and may already be Boomi customers.

Limitations: credit pricing takes modelling: API sources cost 0.5 credit per output table per ingestion, database replication 1 credit per 100 MB, and log-based CDC 2 credits per 100 MB, so CDC-heavy loads add up. Professional, Pro Plus and Enterprise prices are not published, and the roadmap now sits inside Boomi's wider platform.

Pricing: Base at $0.9 per credit; Professional, Pro Plus and Enterprise on quote. 14-day trial or 1,000 free credits, whichever ends first. See Rivery pricing and Fivetran vs Rivery vs Integrate.io.

10. AWS Glue

AWS Glue is Amazon's serverless Spark ETL service with a visual job builder, interactive sessions, a Data Catalog and zero-ETL integrations into Redshift and SageMaker Lakehouse. For teams already inside AWS it removes a vendor rather than adding one.

Best for: AWS-standardized engineering teams with Spark skills and spiky or intermittent workloads, where per-second billing beats a monthly subscription.

Limitations: it is a developer tool. SaaS connector coverage is thin compared with any ELT vendor on this list, there is no reverse ETL, and the real cost is engineering time to build and tune jobs. Costs vary by region.

Pricing: ETL jobs and interactive sessions at $0.44 per DPU-hour, billed per second (Flex execution at $0.29 per DPU-hour). The Data Catalog is free for the first 1 million objects and 1 million requests a month. Zero-ETL integrations carry no extra Glue fee beyond the source and target resources. See AWS Glue pricing and Fivetran vs AWS Glue.

11. Hightouch

Hightouch is the reverse ETL and composable CDP platform: it reads models from the warehouse and syncs them to CRMs, ad platforms and messaging tools, with identity resolution, audience building and an AI Decisioning product on top. It competes with Fivetran's Activations (the former Census) rather than with its connectors.

Best for: marketing and lifecycle teams activating warehouse data, especially those building a CDP on the warehouse instead of buying a packaged one.

Limitations: it does not ingest data into the warehouse, so it is a complement to an ELT tool, not a replacement. Paid pricing is not published and is usage-based.

Pricing: Basic Reverse ETL is free with up to 2 active syncs, unlimited destinations and unlimited seats. Composable CDP and the Agentic Marketing Platform are usage-based on quote. See Hightouch pricing and reverse ETL alternatives to Fivetran.

12. Meltano

Meltano is the code-first, open-source ELT framework built on Singer taps and targets, with Git-versioned project files and CI/CD baked in. Meltano Cloud adds managed infrastructure, reverse ETL and on-demand engineering hours.

Best for: data engineering teams that treat pipelines as code, want 600+ community connectors, and prefer to self-host or to buy compute hours rather than rows.

Limitations: there is no visual builder and no in-pipeline transformation layer; dbt is the expected pairing. Singer connector quality is uneven. Cloud prices are not published.

Pricing: Open is free and self-hosted. Meltano Cloud Starter (200 compute hours a month, 25 workspaces), Growth (2,000 hours, 100 workspaces, 8 engineering hours a month), Scale (5,000 hours, unlimited workspaces, 15 engineering hours) and Enterprise are on quote. See Meltano alternatives.

13. Polytomic

Polytomic combines ETL, reverse ETL and CDC streaming in one product, aimed at teams tired of running one tool to load the warehouse and another to sync it back out. It offers an on-premises deployment on its Enterprise plan.

Best for: mid-size teams that need both directions of data movement with fine-grained, multi-workspace access control, and want fewer vendors.

Limitations: only the starting price is published, the connector catalog is narrower than the big ELT vendors, and transformations are SQL-based rather than visual.

Pricing: from $500 a month; Standard and Enterprise on quote, with on-premises deployment on Enterprise. See Polytomic vs Integrate.io.

Also Worth Knowing

A few tools come up in Fivetran evaluations without being general replacements. Striim and Debezium are the streaming CDC options when the requirement is database replication rather than SaaS connectors: Debezium is open source and needs Kafka expertise, Striim is the managed enterprise product (see our Striim alternatives and Debezium alternatives guides). Qlik Replicate is the heavyweight for mainframe and SAP replication (Qlik Replicate alternatives). Portable sells long-tail SaaS connectors per source for teams whose sources Fivetran does not cover (Portable alternatives). And Skyvia is the cheapest cloud option for small Salesforce and CRM syncs, reviewed in our Skyvia review.

How to Choose by Use Case

Switching from Fivetran: What to Expect

Price comparisons only mean something against real requirements. Before choosing, work through five steps:

1. Quantify current and projected volume. Pull your MAR by connection from the Fivetran usage page, then model what happens as new sources, history mode and deletes are added. Per-connection pricing means small connections no longer ride on big ones.
2. Decide on deployment. Cloud-only, BYOC, self-hosted or regional hosting narrows the list fast: Airbyte, Meltano and Estuary for self-hosted and BYOC; Matillion Scale and Qlik Talend for hybrid; Integrate.io, Hevo and Stitch are cloud services.
3. Map the pricing model to the workload. Spiky or seasonal loads suit per-second or credit billing (AWS Glue, Rivery, Estuary). Steady, high-volume loads suit a flat fee (Integrate.io) or a generous tier (Stitch Premium, Hevo Professional).
4. Count total cost of ownership. Add the transformation layer (dbt seats or model runs), reverse ETL, monitoring and support, and the engineering hours any self-hosted option needs.
5. Run a proof of concept on your three hardest pipelines with the free tier or trial, and compare the measured usage against the vendor's calculator before signing.

Teams moving to Integrate.io get a 30-day onboarding with a dedicated Solution Engineer, a migration tool that recreates existing pipelines, and a contract buyout program for teams still under a Fivetran agreement. The migration guide walks through the steps, and the pricing page shows the Fivetran comparison in full.

FAQs

What is the best Fivetran alternative?

It depends on what is wrong with Fivetran for you. For a predictable bill with transformations, CDC and reverse ETL in one platform, Integrate.io at $1,999 a month flat is the best fit. For a free, self-hosted option, Airbyte. For the cheapest managed loader, Stitch from $100 a month. For real-time streaming, Estuary Flow. For marketing data, Improvado. For reverse ETL only, Hightouch's free tier.

What are the cheapest alternatives to Fivetran?

Airbyte Core and Meltano Open are free to self-host, which makes them the cheapest in license terms, though you pay in infrastructure and engineering time. Among managed services, Stitch starts at $100 a month, Airbyte Cloud at $20 a month, Hevo has a free plan up to 1 million events and a $265 a month Starter tier, and Estuary's Developer plan is free to 10 GB a month. At higher volumes a flat fee such as Integrate.io's $1,999 a month is usually cheaper than any usage-based plan.

How does Fivetran pricing work in 2026?

Fivetran bills on Monthly Active Rows, and since 2026 each connection has its own cost curve with a $5 monthly base charge for standard connections between 1 and 1 million MAR. The Free plan covers 500,000 MAR, 3,500 activation MAR and 5,000 model runs a month. Standard syncs every 15 minutes; Enterprise and Business Critical sync every minute. Transformations beyond the free model runs cost $0.01 per run, falling to $0.002 at scale. Our Fivetran pricing guide has worked examples.

Is there a free Fivetran alternative?

Yes. Airbyte Core and Meltano Open are open source and free to self-host. Fivetran itself has a Free plan up to 500,000 MAR. Hevo (1 million events), Estuary (10 GB a month) and Hightouch (2 active syncs) each have a free tier, and Integrate.io offers a 14-day trial with no card.

Which Fivetran alternatives include transformations?

Integrate.io transforms in the pipeline with 220+ components plus SQL and Python. Matillion and Qlik Talend Cloud include transformation engines (push-down SQL and Talend jobs respectively). Rivery and Polytomic have SQL and Python logic steps. Airbyte, Stitch, Meltano and Hevo's Free plan rely on dbt or warehouse SQL after loading.

Which Fivetran alternatives support CDC?

Integrate.io (60-second CDC on the standard plan), Estuary Flow and Striim (streaming), Rivery (log-based, 2 credits per 100 MB), Airbyte, Polytomic and Qlik Talend Cloud (through the Qlik Replicate engine) all support change data capture. Matillion offers streaming CDC on its Scale edition. Stitch and Hevo have more limited CDC coverage, and AWS Glue relies on other AWS services for it.

How hard is it to migrate off Fivetran?

Connector overlap is high for mainstream sources (Salesforce, HubSpot, Postgres, MySQL, Google Ads, Stripe), so most pipelines can be recreated rather than rebuilt. The work is in transformations if they live in dbt, in historical backfills, and in downstream dependencies on Fivetran's schema naming. Integrate.io's migration program includes a migration tool, a Solution Engineer for 30 days and a buyout of the remaining Fivetran contract.

Related guides: Fivetran review, what is Fivetran, Fivetran vs Integrate.io, Integrate.io as a Fivetran alternative, dbt vs Fivetran, best data integration platforms, Airbyte alternatives, Matillion alternatives, ETL vs ELT, what is operational ETL and reverse ETL explained.