How we make this list: we compare pricing pages, product documentation and public user reviews. Ratings come from G2, Capterra or Trustpilot, with the date we checked them.
Key takeaways
- Fivetran is the managed default for loading data into a warehouse: free up to 500,000 monthly active rows, then MAR pricing per connection. It merged with dbt Labs in June 2026, so ingestion and transformation now sit in one company.
- Airbyte is the open source counterweight: 700 plus connectors, a free self hosted Core, cloud from 20 dollars a month and capacity pricing that does not grow with your row counts.
- Hevo at 239 dollars a month and Stitch from 100 dollars a month sell predictability, flat tiers instead of meters, though Stitch is being absorbed into Qlik Talend Cloud.
- AWS Glue at 0.44 dollars per DPU hour and Azure Data Factory price ETL as cloud compute: cheapest for occasional jobs, metered forever.
- In this category the pricing model is the product. MAR, events, credits, rows and compute hours each punish a different workload shape, so model your own data against the meter before you compare logos.
Quick comparison
| Tool | Best for | Starting price | Free plan |
|---|
 Fivetran | Managed warehouse loading | Free to 500K MAR; then usage | Yes |
 Airbyte | Open source and connector breadth | Free (Core); Cloud from $20/month | Yes |
 Hevo | Predictable flat tier pipelines | $239/month (Starter) | Yes |
 Matillion | Warehouse native transformation | See website | No |
 Stitch | Simple, cheap replication | $100/month (5M rows) | No |
 Qlik Talend Cloud | Enterprise ETL and data quality | See website | No |
 AWS Glue | AWS native batch ETL | $0.44 per DPU hour | No |
 Azure Data Factory | Azure native pipelines | See website | No |
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#1Fivetran
Best for: Managed warehouse loading4.3/5 on
G2 (841 reviews, checked Oct 2026)
Visit fivetran.com
Starting priceFree to 500K MAR; then usage
Free planYes
Fivetran sells the absence of a data engineering chore. For a team whose sources are standard SaaS and databases, it remains the fastest route from signup to a warehouse analysts trust, and the free tier is generous enough to prove it on production shaped data.
Its diligence is arithmetic on your worst table. Pull last quarter's change counts for your three most volatile sources, apply the current MAR curves per connection, and look at that number rather than the free tier's calm.
What we like- The managed benchmark: 700 class connector catalogue maintained by the vendor, automated schema handling and near zero pipeline babysitting once sources are connected, free plan up to 500,000 monthly active rows makes real evaluation possible, pricing is MAR: distinct rows inserted, updated or deleted per month per connection, with a row changed ten times counting once, the June 2026 dbt Labs merger puts the industry's standard transformation tool under the same roof
Watch out for- MAR bills success and churn alike: high change tables and the 2026 changes, deletes now billed and a 5 dollar per connection monthly minimum since January 2026, make bills volatile in exactly the months your data is busiest, contracts carry a reported 12,000 dollar annual minimum, you rent the connectors forever: stop paying and the pipelines stop
#2Airbyte
Best for: Open source and connector breadth4.4/5 on
G2 (78 reviews, checked Oct 2026)
Visit airbyte.com
Starting priceFree (Core); Cloud from $20/month
Free planYes
Airbyte is the strategic answer to Fivetran's meter: own the movement layer, pay for capacity, and keep negotiating power at every renewal. Engineering led organisations have made it the default new build choice.
Choose it with honest staffing. A platform team that exists will run Airbyte happily and cheaply at scale. A two person data team will spend its roadmap as an ETL vendor's unpaid support desk, and should buy managed instead.
What we like- The open standard for data movement: 700 plus connectors, a free self hosted Core edition on the same codebase, and cloud, hybrid and fully on premises deployment options no managed rival matches, published cloud pricing from 20 dollars a month on Standard, with capacity based Data Workers on higher plans that charge for compute capacity, not rows, so high churn tables stop being a billing event, native integrations with dbt, Airflow, Dagster and Prefect keep the transformation layer your choice
Watch out for- Self hosting is operating a data platform: upgrades, scaling and connector failures are your team's on call problem, cloud pricing steps from self serve tiers to contract territory with a reported cliff into five figure annual commitments, connector quality varies across a catalogue that size: the community long tail is not the vendor maintained core, failed syncs can consume volume on credit based plans per pricing analyses, a detail to check on your tier
Starting price$239/month (Starter)
Free planYes
Hevo sells the end of bill anxiety. A flat tier a CFO can approve once is worth real money to a growing company, and its event model is simple to reason about on stable data: count your daily writes and the tier chooses itself.
Its trap is symmetrical to Fivetran's: chatty sources, status tables updating by the minute, turn events into a bonfire. Meter one such source in the free tier before signing.
What we like- The predictability pitch: event based pricing in flat monthly tiers, free up to 1 million events and Starter at 239 dollars a month, so finance can forecast the bill, no code pipeline setup with real time streaming beside batch, aimed at teams without a data engineering bench, covers ETL and ELT both, with in flight transformation for cleaning data before it lands, its own pricing guides argue the model honestly against MAR, which is a fair proxy for how it sells
Watch out for- Event metering counts every record write, repeats included: a row updated ten times is ten events, so high frequency update workloads multiply exactly where MAR forgives, tiers step to reported 1,500 dollars a month at volume, narrowing the gap with the managed leaders, connector and transformation depth trail Fivetran and the enterprise suites, real time claims deserve a load test on your largest source before committing
#4Matillion
Best for: Warehouse native transformation4.4/5 on
G2 (83 reviews, checked Oct 2026)
Visit matillion.com
Starting priceSee website
Free planNo
Matillion is the transformation led answer: where Fivetran loads and leaves modelling to you, Matillion's heart is the visual transformation of warehouse data at warehouse scale. In Snowflake centred shops it has been the default canvas for years.
Post merger, its contest is newly sharp: Fivetran now owns dbt, the code native transformer. A warehouse team choosing its transformation layer in 2026 is really choosing visual canvas versus code.
What we like- Built for the warehouse centred stack: visual, low code pipeline design that pushes transformation down into Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift and Databricks compute, so data is shaped where it already lives, credit based pricing tied to pipeline runs and compute, with its Data Productivity Cloud positioning pipelines, transformation and orchestration in one product, strong for analytics engineering teams who think in SQL but want a visual canvas and scheduling around it, a long track record in the cloud warehouse era, with enterprise references in retail and finance
Watch out for- Credit pricing is quoted through its sales process in current materials, so this guide marks See website and advises modelling your run volume before purchase, warehouse native means the warehouse bill grows with your transformations: the meter moves, it does not vanish, ingestion breadth is narrower than the connector first tools, the visual canvas divides engineers: SQL first teams sometimes prefer code native dbt alone
Starting price$100/month (5M rows)
Free planNo
Stitch is still genuinely good at its small job: cheap, simple replication for a startup's first warehouse. Hundreds of teams run it happily at 100 dollars a month and think about ETL never.
But buy it with eyes open in 2026. The product's future is as a doorway into Qlik Talend Cloud, and your evaluation should include that destination's pricing and shape.
What we like- The simplest priced loader in the market's history: row based tiers, 100 dollars a month for 5 million rows at entry in current pricing analyses, with tiers to about 1,250 dollars, set up in minutes, with the Singer open source tap ecosystem underneath, for small, steady workloads it remains the budget predictable option its model pioneered, now backed by Qlik's ownership and roadmap into its Talend cloud
Watch out for- The strategic fact dominates: Stitch is being absorbed into Qlik Talend Cloud, so a new adoption should be made with the migration path priced and dated, row counting and tier ceilings punish growth spurts: one backfill can consume a month, feature depth is deliberately thin: limited transformation, and enterprise governance lives in the Qlik suite it is joining
#6Qlik Talend Cloud
Best for: Enterprise ETL and data quality3.7/5 on
Capterra (3 reviews, checked Oct 2026)
Visit qlik.com
Starting priceSee website
Free planNo
Qlik Talend Cloud is what this category used to mean: a data integration suite with quality, lineage and stewardship, bought by enterprises whose regulators read their data controls. Against the loaders it looks heavyweight because it is playing a heavier sport.
Evaluate it when governance is the requirement, a bank's, a health system's, a manufacturer's across forty plants. When the requirement is a warehouse filled by Friday, it is the wrong kind of strong.
What we like- The enterprise suite: Talend's two decades of ETL craft, data quality, stewardship and governance inside Qlik's cloud, with Talend Data Fabric for hybrid and on premises estates, transformation in the engine, the classic ETL pattern, suits regulated industries that must shape and cleanse data before it lands anywhere, data quality and profiling depth the loader first tools do not attempt, Stitch's absorption gives small Qlik customers a native growth path inside the same vendor
Watch out for- Quote only pricing, with third party reports putting Starter in the 12,000 to 30,000 dollars a year band, implementation is a programme with specialists, not a signup: the suite rewards organisations with data governance staff, Talend Open Studio, the free tool a generation learned ETL on, was retired in January 2024
- There is no free on ramp left, complexity is the standing complaint: the platform's depth arrives with a learning curve to match
Starting price$0.44 per DPU hour
Free planNo
Glue is the cloud native engineer's ETL: no vendor, no per row meter, just compute by the hour inside the account your data already lives in. For AWS committed teams with Spark skills, its cost curve beats every managed tool at batch scale.
Its absence is the connector shelf. The day the business adopts its ninth SaaS tool, someone must build that ingestion by hand, and Glue shops commonly pair it with Airbyte or Fivetran for sources while keeping Glue for heavy transforms. That hybrid is a legitimate architecture, not a failure.
What we like- Serverless ETL inside AWS: a data catalog, crawlers that infer schemas, and Spark based jobs billed at 0.44 dollars per DPU hour, paying only while jobs run, unbeatable economics for occasional and spiky batch work: a nightly job costs pocket change, a monthly backfill costs a lunch, native citizenship: IAM, S3, Lake Formation and the rest of the AWS estate treat Glue as family, no separate vendor contract or data path, scales from a script to very large batch processing on managed Spark without servers to own
Watch out for- You write and maintain the jobs: Glue is infrastructure with a console, not a connector catalogue, and SaaS sources mean hand built API work, per second minimums and DPU sizing make cost per job an engineering estimate until you have run history, streaming and interactive development have improved but the centre of gravity is batch
Starting priceSee website
Free planNo
Data Factory closes the list as the Azure mirror of Glue, with a more visual authoring style and the integration runtime trick for reaching behind firewalls. Azure committed enterprises run serious estates on it.
Choose between the hyperscalers on citizenship, not features: the ETL tool that lives where your data and identity already live wins on security reviews, networking and consolidated bills.
What we like- Microsoft's pipeline service: visual data flows and code options orchestrating movement and transformation across Azure and beyond, with a wide connector set into the Microsoft estate, consumption pricing across activities, pipeline runs and data movement, so idle pipelines cost little, pairs natively with Synapse and Microsoft Fabric era analytics, enterprise integration features, self hosted integration runtimes, reach on premises systems other cloud tools cannot touch
Watch out for- Its pricing is a meter panel, activity runs, data movement, runtime hours, that resists a single starting figure, so this guide says See website and advises costing a reference pipeline in the Azure calculator, the authoring experience divides users: powerful, sprawling and dated in places, like Glue it is a platform to build on, not a managed connector service: engineering time is part of the price
How we chose
We compared cloud ETL and ELT tools available in October 2026 across managed loaders, open source platforms, warehouse native transformation and hyperscaler services. Pricing models are quoted from vendor materials and July to October 2026 pricing analyses; where a vendor quotes, Matillion and Qlik Talend Cloud, entries say See website. Ownership changes are stated because they change what a buyer is committing to. We ran no pipelines.
Model the meter against your messiest table
Every pricing model in this category is a bet about your data. MAR bets your rows are stable. Event pricing bets they are not updated often. Row tiers bet your volume is steady. Compute hours bet your jobs are occasional. Find the table that breaks each bet, the status table updated by the minute, the monthly backfill, and price that table on every finalist. The tool that survives your worst table wins.
Consolidation is the second diligence. Your loader's owner now also sells transformation, Fivetran with dbt, analytics, Qlik, or a CRM empire, Salesforce with Informatica. Bundles bring discounts and gravity in equal measure. Price the bundle, then price your exit: a year of MAR history and dbt projects inside one vendor's walls is a switching cost to count before it counts you.
Open source deserves an honest line too. Airbyte's Core costs nothing to license and real money to operate: a platform engineer's hours are a price, merely an internal one. Compare managed quotes against those hours at your real salary bands.
And keep the destination in charge. The warehouse you chose dictates half this decision: Matillion presumes it, Glue and Data Factory extend their clouds into it, the loaders feed anything. Decide the analytical home first and the shortlist writes itself.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between ETL and ELT?
Order. ETL transforms data in a dedicated engine before loading it into the warehouse, the classic Talend pattern. ELT loads raw data first and transforms it inside the warehouse, the Fivetran plus dbt pattern that cloud warehouses made standard. Most modern stacks are ELT for analytics and keep ETL habits for regulated data.
How does Fivetran pricing actually work?
By monthly active rows: the distinct rows inserted, updated or deleted in each source connection during the month, with a changed row counting once however often it changed. Deletes became billable in 2026 and each standard connection carries a small monthly minimum. The free plan covers 500,000 MAR.
Is Airbyte really free?
The Core edition is free and open source to self host, forever, on the same codebase as its cloud. Your costs are infrastructure and the engineering time to run it. Airbyte Cloud removes the operating burden with published tiers from 20 dollars a month and capacity based plans above.
What happened to Stitch and Talend's free tool?
Both are inside Qlik now. Stitch continues as a product but is being absorbed into Qlik Talend Cloud, which new buyers should factor into any adoption. Talend Open Studio, the free desktop ETL tool, was retired on 31 January 2024; Qlik Talend Cloud is a paid, quote priced suite.
Which ETL tool is cheapest at small scale?
For tiny, steady loads, Stitch's 100 dollar tier and Hevo's free tier up to 1 million events lead, with Airbyte self hosted at licence zero if you have the hours. For occasional batch jobs in AWS, Glue's 0.44 dollars per DPU hour can cost less than any subscription.
Sources we checked (0)
Is your product missing or out of date?
We review this list regularly. Vendors can request a listing, send updated pricing or ask about featured placement.
Shihab Mia · Founder, Rankite
Shihab has 5+ years in B2B and SaaS SEO. He writes Rankite's software buying guides from pricing pages, documentation and public user reviews. More about Shihab.