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 Informatica

Informatica offers a portfolio of data integration products as well as tools for master data management, data quality, data cataloging, and API management. Informatica started out with on-premises tools but now offers a cloud platform as well.

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	Data integration, ETL	Data ingestion, ELT
Database replication	Only via plugins	Full table; incremental via change data capture	Full table; incremental via change data capture or SELECT/replication keys
SaaS sources	Only via plugins	More than 80	More than 100
Ability for customers to add new data sources	Yes	Yes	Yes
Connects to data warehouses? Data lakes?	Yes / Yes	Yes / Yes	Yes / Yes
Transparent pricing	Yes	No	Yes
G2 customer satisfaction	Not Rated	4/5	4.8/5
Support SLAs	No	Available	Available
Purchase process	Free to download and use	Requires conversation with sales	Options for self-service or talking with sales. Also available from the AWS store.
Compliance, governance, and security certifications	None	HIPAA, SOC 2, SOC 3, Privacy Shield	HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2
Data sharing	Yes, via plugins	Yes, through Informatica Cloud	Yes, through Talend Data Fabric
Vendor lock-in	Free to use	Annual contracts. No open source	Month to month or annual contracts. Open source integrations
Developer tools	Experimental REST API	Informatica Developer Tool, REST API, Connector Toolkit	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.

Informatica

Informatica has been an on-premises product for most of its history, and much of the product is focused on preload transformations, which is an important feature when sending data to an on-premises data warehouse. Informatica includes a library of prebuilt transformations and the ability to build custom transformations using a proprietary transformation language.

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 tasks, which are sets of activities, via operators, 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 hooks — 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.

Informatica

Informatica provides Cloud Connectors for more than 100 applications and databases. The only cloud data warehouse destination it supports is Amazon Redshift. It also support Pivotal's Greenplum on-premises platform. The only data lake destination it supports is Microsoft Azure SQL Data Lake. Developers can create new connectors using Informatica Connector Toolkit.

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.

Informatica

Informatica provides three levels of support. Basic Success is available during business hours. Premium Success offers 24x7 support for Priority 1 cases. Signature Support offers 24x7 support for all cases. Documentation is comprehensive. The company offers training through Informatica University.

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.

Informatica

Informatica has many products, each of which may have several optional components. The base version of Integration Cloud starts at $2,000 per month. The pricing of add-on tiers is undisclosed. Informatica provides a 30-day free trial for many of its products.

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.

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