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ETL / ELT Software · Rank #1 of 10

Fivetran review and pricing

Managed ELT share leader with the broadest connector reliability and the loudest pricing complaints.

By Fivetran · Founded 2012 · Oakland, CA · private

Fivetran is the managed ELT market leader, founded 2012, last priced at a $5.6B post-money valuation in the September 2021 Series D. The product covers 500+ pre-built connectors, automated schema drift handling, and tight push-down transformation via dbt Core integration. Strengths: highest connector reliability in the category, shortest time-to-first-row, mature governance (SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA BAA, GDPR posture). Trade-offs: MAR (Modified Active Rows) consumption pricing is the single most consistent buyer complaint we tracked across 2025 and 2026, bills can spike unexpectedly when upstream sources mutate row patterns, and the gap between list pricing and verified enterprise deal pricing is wide. Customer support quality is strong on Business Critical tier but uneven below it.

Best for

Mid-market and enterprise data teams (200 to 10,000+ employees) that want hands-off managed ELT, value connector reliability above predictable monthly billing, and have governance over upstream sources to manage MAR volatility.

Worst for

Cost-sensitive mid-market priced out by MAR volatility (Hevo or Airbyte fit better), engineering-led teams that want self-host (Airbyte better), or teams with high-mutation upstream systems where MAR billing is structurally punitive.

Vendor Trust Score

Is Fivetran a trustworthy vendor?

7.3/10
Mixed
Pricing transparency
Published rates; no hidden fees
5.5
Contract fairness
Reasonable terms; no auto-renew traps
7.0
Incident response
How they handle outages and breaches
7.5
Post-acquisition behavior
Customer treatment after M&A or PE
8.5
Executive stability
Leadership churn over 24 months
8.0
Roadmap honesty
Public commitments held
7.5
Trust signal log
  • 2021-09-21
    Series D raised at $5.6B post-money valuation
    Andreessen Horowitz led; positioned Fivetran for category leadership.
  • 2023-02-08
    Acquired HVR for log-based replication and CDC capability
  • 2024-08-15
    MAR pricing volatility flagged as the top complaint in industry forums
    r/dataengineering threads and G2 reviews consistently surface unexpected bill spikes tied to upstream mutation patterns.
  • 2025-11-04
    Hybrid Deployment GA across all major clouds; in-VPC connectors for regulated workloads
Vendor Trust is scored independently of product quality. A great product from an unfair vendor still earns a low trust score.
Review Intelligence

What 540 reviews actually say

Synthesized from G2, Capterra, Reddit, Trustpilot. Patterns >15% prevalence shown.

Last synthesized
2026-04-29

Praise patterns

  • Connector reliability is the best in category
    87%
  • Shortest time-to-first-row of any managed ELT
    78%
  • Schema drift handling rarely requires pipeline rewrites
    64%
  • dbt Core push-down integration matured significantly
    47%

Complaint patterns

  • MAR consumption pricing produces unexpected bill spikes
    78%
  • Gap between list pricing and quoted enterprise deals is wide
    51%
  • Support quality uneven below Business Critical tier
    41%
  • Long-tail SaaS sources less covered than Airbyte or Portable
    31%
Sentiment trend (6 months)
75/100 -1 pts
12
01
02
03
04
05
Representative voices
  • “Fivetran is the only ELT where I can promise the CFO a pipeline will run with 99.9 uptime. The price predictability story is a different conversation, MAR can swing 30 percent month to month on upstream changes we did not author.”

    Director of Data Engineering, B2B SaaS· G2 · 2026-03-12

  • “We left for Airbyte at our last renewal. Fivetran was technically excellent and twice the price after a Salesforce schema change we did not even ship.”

    Staff Data Engineer, marketplace· Reddit r/dataengineering · 2026-02-04

Patterns are extracted from review corpus and human-verified. We surface trends, not anecdotes.
Verified Pricing

What buyers actually pay

247 anonymized deal disclosures · last updated 2026-05-01

Contribute your deal price
Company size Median annual
50-200 employees $36,000
200-1,000 employees $168,000
1,000+ employees $720,000
Verified pricing is crowdsourced from buyers under anonymity guarantees. Vendor-listed prices are validated against actual deals quarterly.
Compliance & Security

Auto-verified certifications

Verified 2026-05-01
SOC 2 Type II
ISO 27001
HIPAA
GDPR
CCPA
PCI DSS
FedRAMP In-Process

Editorial: Strengths

  • 500+ pre-built connectors with the highest reliability scores in category
  • Automated schema drift handling that does not require pipeline rewrites
  • Native dbt Core integration for push-down transformation
  • Strong governance: SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA BAA, GDPR, ISO 27001
  • Hybrid Deployment option for connectors that need to stay in-VPC
  • Mature partner ecosystem with Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery

Editorial: Weaknesses

  • MAR-based consumption pricing produces unexpected bill spikes
  • Wide gap between list pricing and verified enterprise deal pricing
  • Support quality uneven below Business Critical tier
  • Custom connector SDK still feels like a second-class citizen
  • Long-tail SaaS sources less covered than Portable or Airbyte community connectors

Key features & integrations

  • +500+ pre-built connectors
  • +Automated schema drift handling
  • +Push-down dbt Core integration
  • +Hybrid Deployment (connectors stay in customer VPC)
  • +Log-based CDC where supported by source
  • +Column-level masking and PII detection
  • +Lineage and metadata API
  • +Custom Connector SDK
500+ integrations
SnowflakeDatabricksBigQueryRedshiftSalesforceHubSpotNetSuiteWorkdaySAPPostgreSQLMySQLMongoDBdbt
Geography supported
Global
Best fit
200-10,000+ employees · Mid-market through global enterprise
Editorial deep-dive

Read our full ranking of ETL / ELT Software

Fivetran ranks #1 in our editorial review of 10 etl / elt software platforms. The deep-dive covers methodology, comparison tables, decision matrix, migration scoring, and FAQs.

Read the full ranking

Closest alternatives in ETL / ELT Software

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