Talend vs Fivetran | ETL Tool Comparison

Choosing the best ETL tool is paramount to business success. Find the optimal solution using this feature comparison from Talend and Fivetran.

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The more data your business has — and the more sources it comes from — the more complicated it is to consolidate everything and extract meaningful insights from the numbers. ETL software automates this data collection process for your business, making data-driven decisions a cinch. Today we compare Talend and Fivetran’s ETL software solutions to help you decide which is best for your business.

What is Languages?

talent is a suite of cloud-based data apps designed for ETL work. It’s open source, so it’s easy to get started for free with the basics and build your own data connectors with the specs you need. Various paid plans offer even more options.

What is Fivetran?

fivetran is a SaaS data integration service that makes it easy to connect all your data and apps using automated pipelines. Fivetran is not open source, so while it offers many data connectors out-of-the-box, you can’t build your own.

Talent vs. Fivetran function comparison

	talent	fivetran
Option without code	New	Yes
Data Extractions	Yes	Yes
Data integration	Yes	Yes
Data Quality Control	Yes	Yes
Reporting/analysis	Yes	Yes

Platform without code

Perhaps the biggest differentiator between Talend and Fivetran is the latter’s no-code option. Fivetran is designed to get you up and running in days or even hours, and it doesn’t require any coding knowledge to work, although it does offer the ability to modify queries via SQL if you have that knowledge. So you don’t need a dedicated data engineer to start and use Fivetran, making it a great option for teams that don’t have that kind of support.

The open source nature of Talend does come at the cost of user-friendliness, and you almost certainly need a data engineer to set up the pipelines and make the most of the service. The trade-off for this higher learning curve is more functionality and lots of connector options (more on that in the next section), but for teams that need a no-code option, Fivetran is a better choice in this category.

SEE: Job description: ETL/data warehouse developer (Tech Republic Premium)

Data sources and extraction

Fivetran offers more than 100 data connectors out-of-the-box, and the service routinely adds more. fivetran’s ready-made connectors cover virtually all major data sources, including Oracle, Zoho, Salesforce, and SAP. If you only need to connect to traditional data sources, Fivetran probably offers everything you need in an easy-to-use package.

Technically, Fivetran offers the option to build a custom “feature connector”, but the software’s emphasis is on the selection of existing connectors, and some users have commented that they are sometimes surprised at how often they can’t connect to the data they need.

If you need to get data from more unusual sources, Talend is a better bet. Due to the open source nature of the software, there are hundreds and hundreds of connectors are available built by Talend itself or by other users, with more being added all the time, so you have a lot more options than Fivetran out of the gate. If by any chance someone hasn’t made the connector you need yet, you can let your data engineer build one yourself.

Data analysis and visualization

While there are many great business intelligence software options that make it easy to analyze and visualize your platform, not every company wants to add another solution to the mix. Fivetran provides basic data analytics visualization capabilities so you can quickly extract insights from the data.

Talend also offers this option via Talend Open Data Studio, a separate download. The charts and graphical conversation tools are quite rudimentary in terms of aesthetics, but they get the job done, especially for internal analysis. If you want a powerful BI platform, you should probably look into a separate solution, such as Microsoft Power BI.

SEE: Cheat Sheet: Microsoft Power BI (Free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Talent vs. Fivetran: which one should you choose?

Both Talend and Fivetran are solid offerings in the ETL category, but they are designed with different users in mind. Fivetran is more aimed at beginners and non-software experts who need to quickly and easily connect to common data sources with no coding knowledge. Talend is designed for power users willing to master the learning curve in exchange for more data connectivity.