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 Elastic Logstash

Elastic is the corporate name of the company behind Elasticsearch. Logstash is a command-line tool that runs under Linux or macOS or in a Docker container. It integrates log data into the Elasticsearch search and analytics service. Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana make up the company's ELK Stack.

About mParticle

mParticle is a mobile-focused event tracking and data ingestion tool. It lets users track events across multiple applications and send event data to multiple destinations. It's designed to collect and connect customer data from multiple marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools. It's not primarily an ETL tool, but it does include connectivity to some SaaS data sources and data warehouse destinations. To the extent that it performs ETL operations, mParticle focuses on the E and L, extraction and loading.

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	Log replication and management	Mobile-focused event tracking and data ingestion	Data ingestion, ELT
Database replication	None	No database sources	Full table; incremental via change data capture or SELECT/replication keys
SaaS sources	None	About 150	More than 100
Ability for customers to add new data sources	Yes	Yes, via Events API	Yes
Connects to data warehouses? Data lakes?	Yes / Yes	Yes / Yes	Yes / Yes
Transparent pricing	Yes	No	Yes
G2 customer satisfaction	4/5	3.5/5	4.8/5
Support SLAs	No	No	Available
Purchase process	Available as a free download. Also bundled as part of the Elastic Stack, which is available via subscription	Requires a conversation with sales	Options for self-service or talking with sales. Also available from the AWS store.
Compliance, governance, and security certifications	GDPR, SOC 2 Type 2	GDPR, ISO/IEC 27001:2013, SOC 2 Type II	HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2
Data sharing	No	No	Yes, through Talend Data Fabric
Vendor lock-in	Logstash is open source software shipped under the Elastic license	Annual contracts	Month to month or annual contracts. Open source integrations
Developer tools	Four monitoring APIs, instructions for writing plugins in Java	Several APIs and client SDKs	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

Elastic Logstash

Logstash provides plugins for several kinds of transformations, including filtering and deserializing data, extracting fields, and enriching data with lookups. Filters are text files, and users can edit existing filters and write their own; Logstash filters are Ruby gems.

mParticle

mParticle extracts raw data from sources and loads it into destinations without allowing users to define their own transformations — though mParticle itself transforms events and objects to conform to its standard as it sends them between different tools, including to the data warehouse. mParticle also lets users create preload transformations in a graphical interface, and write custom rules in JavaScript.

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.

Elastic Logstash

Logstash supports more than 50 log and event data sources. Destinations include Google BigQuery data warehouse, Google Cloud Storage and Amazon S3 data lakes, Elasticsearch, and more than 50 other file formats and operational monitoring platforms.

mParticle

mParticle has a different focus than most ETL tools — it's designed to track events from applications, websites, and mobile apps and unify them into customer profiles. An event is a set of actions that represents a step in the funnel, such as user invited or signed up or order completed. Users can define events that make sense for their business use cases, based on key metrics that provide business value. You embed mParticle tracking into mobile apps or connected devices. The platform creates unique mobile identifiers and tracks things like device IDs, location data, and in-app activity. mParticle supports about 170 destinations, most of which are SaaS platforms for marketing, advertising, and analytics. It also supports data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake. Customers can use mParticle's developer tools to track new event sources, but no one outside of the mParticle team or its partners can build new cloud app sources.

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.

Elastic Logstash

Logstash vendor Elasticsearch provides support through a customer-only portal. Logstash is also supported through an open source community. Documentation is comprehensive. Digital training materials are not available.

mParticle

mParticle provides support via email. Documentation is comprehensive. Digital training materials are not available.

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

Elastic Logstash

Logstash is a free download, and is available bundled with other products in the Elastic Stack as a subscription, which starts at $16 per month. More expensive plans are available that feature things like dedicated support, custom plugins, machine learning, and advanced security features.

mParticle

Pricing is not disclosed.

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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