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 Dell Boomi

Boomi implements cloud-based application integration using a graphical front-end interface. The company was acquired by Dell in 2010.

About Apache Airflow

Apache Airflow is an open source project that lets developers orchestrate workflows to extract, transform, load, and store data.

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	Application integration, workflow automation	Orchestration, scheduling, workflows	Data ingestion, ELT
Database replication	Full table	Only via plugins	Full table; incremental via change data capture or SELECT/replication keys
SaaS sources	80	Only via plugins	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	No	Yes	Yes
G2 customer satisfaction	4.2/5	Not Rated	4.8/5
Support SLAs	Available	No	Available
Purchase process	Requires a conversation with sales	Free to download and use	Options for self-service or talking with sales. Also available from the AWS store.
Compliance, governance, and security certifications	HIPAA/HITRUST, PCI DSS, ISO 27001	None	HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2
Data sharing	No	Yes, via plugins	Yes, through Talend Data Fabric
Vendor lock-in	Monthly or annual contracts	Free to use	Month to month or annual contracts. Open source integrations
Developer tools	AtomSphere API for programmatic control of the AtomSphere platform, Connector SDK for writing custom connectors	Experimental 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

Dell Boomi

Boomi handles process execution through procedures it calls shapes. Boomi supports a set of prebuilt transformations within its various shapes (such as text encoding, encryption/decryption, search/replace, and combining documents), and it lets users create custom preload transformations by coding JavaScript or Groovy scripts to convert data from the source application into a format that can be used by the destination.

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.

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.

Dell Boomi

Like other application integration platforms, Boomi typically replicates data changes one at a time between multiple systems, as events happen, rather than pushing batches of data to a single central repository. Boomi supports two kinds of connectors, which it calls application and technology connectors. There are 80 application connectors (mostly to SaaS platforms, including data warehouses and data lakes) and 22 technology connectors (to databases and services like SFTP, HTTP, and IMAP). Developers can write their own custom connectors in Java using Boomi's Connector SDK.

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.

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.

Dell Boomi

All customers get email support, and customers on premier support plans get live chat and phone support. Dell also offers Boomi consulting, including onsite consulting for support. Documentation on Dell's help site is comprehensive. A community site provides additional peer and company support. Dell offers on-demand and instructor-led digital training.

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.

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

Dell Boomi

Plans are billed monthly, starting with a rate of $549 per month. A 30-day free trial is available.

Apache Airflow

Airflow is free and open source, licensed under Apache License 2.0.

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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