We commonly hear from our customers that when they initially evaluate cloud data integration solutions, both Fivetran and Stitch came up in their searches.

With Stitch's announcement of their free plan deprecation, we’ve received an influx of questions on how the two solutions differ. Below, we highlight the differences in our approaches to handling automated ELT, as well as pricing differences.

Differences between Fivetran and Stitch

• Source support: Stitch created Singer, an open-source solution, that provides a framework for integrations with non-native connectors. Many of its integrations are denoted as community supported or initiated. All Fivetran integrations are built and maintained in-house by our teams.
• Schema design: Fivetran provides entity relationship diagrams (ERDs) (e.g., Shopify) that show table relations in a graphical format. Stitch, on the other hand, displays depth of data integrations in a tabular format. The structure of these tables differ, so we encourage you to explore how data is presented in your warehouse when you test, to ensure that you are comfortable drawing insights from the landed schemas.
• Transformations: Both Stitch and Fivetran do some common transformations pre-load, but only Fivetran provides post-load transformation options for additional modeling with off-the-shelf data models.
  
• Ownership: Fivetran plans to stay independent to maintain full control over the process of using customer feedback to drive the product roadmap.

Fivetran vs. Stitch pricing

• Raw rows vs. active rows: Stitch and many other SaaS data integration tools use raw rows for their pricing models, while Fivetran uses active rows. Raw rows will account for any record updates, deletes or net new rows. Active rows, in the context of Fivetran, means that whether a record is updated 1,000 or 1 million times, we only count one “active" row. In general, raw rows will typically have a higher count than active rows, due to the way source systems tend to update records in addition to generating new ones.
• No minimum spend at Fivetran: We recently removed our minimum spend requirements, so anyone can get started using Fivetran and pay for the service only when data is synced.
• Online purchasing through Fivetran: In addition to having no minimum spend requirements, we also offer the ability to use a credit card for billing, which bypasses most traditional, and often lengthy, buying processes.

Whether you believe one or the other is the right choice for your business, we recommend that you try any solution before you buy. See Fivetran in action with a free 14-day trial.