Apache Airflow vs. Alteryx vs. Stitch
ETL software comparison
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Most businesses have data stored in a variety of locations, from in-house databases to SaaS platforms. To get a full picture of their finances and operations, they pull data from all those sources into a data warehouse or data lake and run analytics against it. But they don't want to build and maintain their own data pipelines.
Fortunately, it’s not necessary to code everything in-house. Here's an comparison of two such tools, head to head.
About Apache Airflow
Apache Airflow is an open source project that lets developers orchestrate workflows to extract, transform, load, and store data.
About Alteryx
Alteryx offers several products:
- Designer, the company's primary product, is a data preparation and blending tool.
- Server lets organizations self-host data analytics.
- Connect is a platform for sharing analytics.
- Promote helps analytic teams deploy predictive models.
- Data Sets gives customers Location and Business Insights data sets for analytics.
About Stitch
Stitch Data Loader is a cloud-based platform for ETL — extract, transform, and load. More than 3,000 companies use Stitch to move billions of records every day from SaaS applications and databases into data warehouses and data lakes, where it can be analyzed with BI tools. Stitch is a Talend company and is part of the Talend Data Fabric.
 |  |  | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Focus | Orchestration, scheduling, workflows | ETL, transformations, data prep | Data ingestion, ELT | |||||||||||
| Database replication | Only via plugins | Full table; incremental via SELECT/replication keys | Full table; incremental via change data capture or SELECT/replication keys | |||||||||||
| SaaS sources | Only via plugins | Fewer than 10 | More than 100 | |||||||||||
| Ability for customers to add new data sources | Yes | No | Yes | |||||||||||
| Connects to data warehouses? Data lakes? | Yes / Yes | Yes / Yes | Yes / Yes | |||||||||||
| Transparent pricing | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||||||||||
G2 customer satisfaction | Not Rated | 4.4/5 | 4.8/5 | |||||||||||
| Support SLAs | No | No | Available | |||||||||||
| Purchase process | Free to download and use | Requires a conversation with sales | Options for self-service or talking with sales. Also available from the AWS store. | |||||||||||
| Compliance, governance, and security certifications | None | None | HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2 | |||||||||||
| Data sharing | Yes, via plugins | No | Yes, through Talend Data Fabric | |||||||||||
| Vendor lock-in | Free to use | Annual contracts | Month to month or annual contracts. Open source integrations | |||||||||||
| Developer tools | Experimental REST API | REST API | Import API, Stitch Connect API for integrating Stitch with other platforms, Singer open source project | |||||||||||
Let's dive into some of the details of each platform.
Transformations
Apache Airflow
Apache Airflow is a powerful tool for authoring, scheduling, and monitoring workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAG) of tasks. A DAG is a topological representation of the way data flows within a system. Airflow manages execution dependencies among jobs (known as operators in Airflow parlance) in the DAG, and programmatically handles job failures, retries, and alerting. Developers can write Python code to transform data as an action in a workflow.
Alteryx
Alteryx lets users drag tool icons onto its graphical workspace for in-database data cleansing, transformation, filtering, selection, and sorting. Developers can also write custom functions in C++ and XML macro functions and incorporate them into the Alteryx interface.
Stitch
Stitch is an ELT product. Within the pipeline, Stitch does only transformations that are required for compatibility with the destination, such as translating data types or denesting data when relevant. Stitch is part of Talend, which also provides tools for transforming data either within the data warehouse or via external processing engines such as Spark and MapReduce. Transformations can be defined in SQL, Python, Java, or via graphical user interface.
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Connectors: Data sources and destinations
Each of these tools supports a variety of data sources and destinations.
Apache Airflow
Airflow orchestrates workflows to extract, transform, load, and store data. It run <b>tasks</b>, which are sets of activities, via <b>operators</b>, which are templates for tasks that can by Python functions or external scripts. Developers can create operators for any source or destination. In addition, Airflow supports plugins that implement operators and <b>hooks</b> — interfaces to external platforms. The Airflow community has built plugins for databases like MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server and SaaS platforms such as Salesforce, Stripe, and Facebook Ads.
Alteryx
Alteryx supports integrations with about 80 file formats, storage platforms, databases, data warehouses, and data lakes. It focuses on data preparation and blending more than on providing a wide range of connections to extract data from SaaS sources. Destinations include Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Snowflake, and more than 40 other file formats, databases, and on-premises data warehouses.
Stitch
Stitch supports more than 100 database and SaaS integrationsas data sources, and eight data warehouse and data lake destinations. Customers can contract with Stitch to build new sources, and anyone can add a new source to Stitch by developing it according to the standards laid out in Singer, an open source toolkit for writing scripts that move data. Singer integrations can be run independently, regardless of whether the user is a Stitch customer. Running Singer integrations on Stitch’s platform allows users to take advantage of Stitch's monitoring, scheduling, credential management, and autoscaling features.
Support, documentation, and training
Data integration tools can be complex, so vendors offer several ways to help their customers. Online documentation is the first resource users often turn to, and support teams can answer questions that aren't covered in the docs. Vendors of the more complicated tools may also offer training services.
Apache Airflow
The open source community provides Airflow support through a Slack community. Documentation includes quick start and how-to guides. Other than a tutorial on the Apache website there are no training resources.
Alteryx
Alteryx provides support through an online community and an email ticketing system. Documentation is comprehensive. Both the company and the community provide digital training resources.
Stitch
Stitch provides in-app chat support to all customers, and phone support is available for Enterprise customers. Support SLAs are available. Documentation is comprehensive and is open source — anyone can contribute additions and improvements or repurpose the content. Stitch does not provide training services.
Pricing
Apache Airflow
Airflow is free and open source, licensed under Apache License 2.0.
Alteryx
Alteryx provides a 14-day free trial. Alteryx Designer costs $5,195 per user per year. Add-ons are available for an additional cost.
Stitch
Stitch has pricing that scales to fit a wide range of budgets and company sizes. All new users get an unlimited 14-day trial. Standard plans range from $100 to $1,250 per month depending on scale, with discounts for paying annually. Enterprise plans for larger organizations and mission-critical use cases can include custom features, data volumes, and service levels, and are priced individually.
Get started now
Which tool is better overall? That's something every organization has to decide based on its unique requirements, but we can help you get started. Sign up now for a free trial of Stitch.
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