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 Google Cloud Data Fusion

Google Cloud Data Fusion is a cloud-native data integration service. It's one of several Google data analytics services, including:

BigQuery, a cloud data warehouse
Google Data Studio, a relatively simple platform for reporting and visualization
Google Cloud Datalab, a more robust analytics tool that lets data professionals explore, analyze, transform, and visualize data and build machine learning models
Google Cloud Dataprep, a data service for exploring, cleaning, and preparing structured and unstructured data
Google Cloud Dataflow, a platform for ingesting and processing real-time data

Stitch and Talend partner with Google. While this page details our products that have some overlapping functionality and the differences between them, we're more complementary than we are competitive. Google offers lots of products beyond those mentioned here, and we have thousands of customers who successfully use our solutions together.

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	Data integration	Orchestration, scheduling, workflows	Data ingestion, ELT
Database replication	Full table; incremental replication via custom SELECT statements	Only via plugins	Full table; incremental via change data capture or SELECT/replication keys
SaaS sources	None	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	Yes	Yes	Yes
Support SLAs	Yes	No	Available
Purchase process	Self-service	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	None	HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2
Data sharing	Yes	Yes, via plugins	Yes, through Talend Data Fabric
Vendor lock-in	Month to month. Cloud Data Fusion is powered by the open source project CDAP	Free to use	Month to month or annual contracts. Open source integrations
Developer tools	REST API to manage Cloud Data Fusion instances	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

Google Cloud Data Fusion

Cloud Data Fusion supports simple preload transformations — validating, formatting, and encrypting or decrypting data, among other operations — created in a graphical user interface.

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.

Try Stitch for free for 14 days

Unlimited data volume during trial
Set up in minutes

Set up in minutesUnlimited data volume during trial

No credit card required

Connectors: Data sources and destinations

Each of these tools supports a variety of data sources and destinations.

Google Cloud Data Fusion

Cloud Data Fusion is a beta service on Google Cloud Platform. The platform supports almost 20 file and database sources and more than 20 destinations, including databases, file formats, and real-time resources. Cloud Data Fusion doesn't support any SaaS data sources.

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.

Google Cloud Data Fusion

Google provides several support plans for Google Cloud Platform, which Cloud Data Fusion is part of. Documentation is comprehensive. Google offers both digital and in-person 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

Google Cloud Data Fusion

Cloud Data Fusion is priced differently for development and execution. Development is priced per instance per hour at two different rates, for Basic and Enterprise editions. Execution runs at Google Cloud Dataproc rates.

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.

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.

Give Stitch a try, on us

Select your integrations, choose your warehouse, and enjoy Stitch free for 14 days.

Set up in minutesUnlimited data volume during trial