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 Segment

Segment has a different focus than most ETL tools — it's designed to collect and connect customer data from multiple marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools and unify it into customer profiles. It's not primarily an ETL tool, but it does include connectivity to some SaaS data sources and data warehouse destinations.

In Segment, 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, and create tracking plans to document the events and properties they intend to collect across Segment sources.

About Azure Database Migration Service

Azure Database Migration Service is a managed service designed to enable migrations from multiple database sources to Microsoft Azure data platforms. The service uses Microsoft's Data Migration Assistant to generate assessment reports that provide recommendations to guide you through the changes required. When you're ready to begin the migration process, Azure Database Migration Service performs all the required steps.

Stitch and Talend partner closely with Microsoft. While this page details our products that have some overlapping functionality and the differences between them, we're more complementary than we are competitive. Microsoft Azure offers lots of products beyond what's mentioned on this page, 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.


Focus	Event tracking, data ingestion, ELT	Migrating on-premises databases to the cloud	Data ingestion, ELT
Database replication	No database data sources	One-time migration only — not designed for ongoing replication	Full table; incremental via change data capture or SELECT/replication keys
SaaS sources	About 35	None	More than 100
Ability for customers to add new data sources	For events but not cloud app sources (see explanation below)	No	Yes
Connects to data warehouses? Data lakes?	Yes / No	No / No	Yes / Yes
Transparent pricing	Yes	Yes	Yes
G2 customer satisfaction	4.6/5	3.9/5	4.8/5
Support SLAs	Available	Yes	Available
Purchase process	Options for self-service and talking with sales	Options for self-service or talking with sales	Options for self-service or talking with sales. Also available from the AWS store.
Compliance, governance, and security certifications	GDPR	HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, others	HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2
Data sharing	No	No	Yes, through Talend Data Fabric
Vendor lock-in	Month to month or annual contracts. The company maintains several open source projects.	Month to month	Month to month or annual contracts. Open source integrations
Developer tools	JavaScript library, mobile SDKs, server-side libraries, HTTP Tracking API, Pixel Tracking API, Objects API, Objects Bulk API	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

Segment

To the extent that it performs ETL operations, Segment focuses on the E and L, extraction and loading. It extracts raw data from sources and loads it into destinations without allowing users to define their own transformations — though Segment itself transforms events and objects to conform to its standard as it sends them between different tools, including to the data warehouse.

Azure Database Migration Service

Azure Database Migration Services does no transformation. DMS is intended to be a simple way to do easy migrations, such as from on-premises SQL Server to Azure SQL Database, or MySQL to Azure Database for MySQL, or MongoDB to Azure Cosmos DB.

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.

Segment

Segment offers integrations for several different kinds of sources: <li>It tracks and sends events between more than 250 supported tools.</li> <li>It replicates data from about 35 cloud app sources that are common among ETL tools.</li> To understand the difference between the events and SaaS data sources, take the example of Salesforce, which is one of a handful of integrations supported in both categories. Event tracking would enable updates to Salesforce leads and contacts based things those users did in a separate system, like a mobile app. If you want to replicate all of the data in your Salesforce instance to your data warehouse, including information entered by your sales team, that’s only possible with a cloud app source. Customers can use Segment's developer tools to track new event sources, but no one outside of the Segment team can build new cloud app sources. Segment supports six destinations: <li>Amazon Redshift</li> <li>Google BigQuery</li> <li>Snowflake</li> <li>Azure SQL Data Warehouse</li> <li>Postgres</li> <li>IBM Db2</li>

Azure Database Migration Service

Azure Database Migration Service integrates with 10 on-premises database sources and six Azure database destinations, but no data warehouse or data lake destinations.

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.

Segment

Segment provides support through a ticketing system. Documentation is comprehensive. Segment does not provide training services.

Azure Database Migration Service

Azure Database Migration Service provides support via online forums and an online support request form. Email and phone support are available. Documentation is comprehensive. Digital training materials are 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

Segment

Segment provides a 14-day free trial, and has a free Developer tier. Team accounts start at $120 per month. Pricing is based in part on the volume of monthly tracked users in data sources. Business plans for larger organizations are priced individually.

Azure Database Migration Service

Pricing for Azure Database Migration Service is calculated based on compute hours used.

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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