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 MuleSoft

The MuleSoft Anypoint Platform includes several components:

  • Anypoint Design Center provides tools to build connectors and implement data and application flows, including the Anypoint Studio desktop IDE.
  • Anypoint Security defends the APIs and integrations users build.
  • Mule runtime engine powers the platform's connections to applications, data, and devices.
  • Anypoint Management Center lets users manage APIs and users, analyze traffic, monitor SLAs, and fix integration flows.
  • 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 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.

    MuleSoft LogoGoogle Cloud Data Fusion LogoStitch Logo
    FocusEnterprise Service Bus (ESB), application integrationData integrationData ingestion, ELT
    Database replicationIncremental replication depends upon manually written SELECT statementsFull table; incremental replication via custom SELECT statementsFull table; incremental via change data capture or SELECT/replication keys
    SaaS sourcesAbout 70NoneMore than 100
    Ability for customers to add new data sourcesYesYesYes
    Connects to data warehouses? Data lakes?No / YesYes / YesYes / Yes
    Transparent pricingNoYesYes
    G2 customer satisfactionHelp4.5/5Not Rated4.8/5
    Support SLAsYesYesAvailable
    Purchase processRequires a conversation with salesSelf-serviceOptions for self-service or talking with sales. Also available from the AWS store.
    Compliance, governance, and security certificationsHIPAA/HITRUST, GDPR, Level-1 PCI-DSS, SOC 2, FIPSHIPAAHIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2
    Data sharingYesYesYes, through Talend Data Fabric
    Vendor lock-inAnnual contracts. Mule Kernel is available as open source, licensed under the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL).Month to month. Cloud Data Fusion is powered by the open source project CDAPMonth to month or annual contracts. Open source integrations
    Developer toolsRuntime Manager REST API, CloudHub APIREST API to manage Cloud Data Fusion instancesImport 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

    MuleSoft

    MuleSoft specializes in application integration — moving data from one application or platform to another. Each application has defined data structures, so MuleSoft often has to transform data from a source to fit the destination schema. MuleSoft comes with more than 20 prepackaged "transformers," and gives developers the ability to write their own custom processors in scripting languages such as JavaScript and Groovy.

    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.

    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.

    MuleSoft

    Like other application integration platforms, MuleSoft 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. MuleSoft supports almost 300 connectors to databases, SaaS platforms, storage resources, and network services. It supports Amazon S3 data lakes, but no cloud data warehouses.

    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.

    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.

    MuleSoft

    MuleSoft provides online, email, and telephone support. Documentation is comprehensive. Digital training materials are available.

    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.

    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

    MuleSoft

    MuleSoft provides a 30-day free trial. Pricing isn't disclosed.

    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.

    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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