As data volumes and complexity continue to grow, choosing the right ETL tool is essential for data professionals. ETL tools simplify the process of extracting, transforming, and loading data from multiple sources, ensuring data accuracy and consistency for seamless decision-making.
To help you find the best tool for your specific use case, we analyzed hundreds of G2 reviews and curated this list of the 21 best ETL tools available today. We’ll cover key features, use cases, and pricing, giving you a clear view of the market and helping you make an informed decision. Let’s dive in and explore the top options!
What is ETL and what is its importance?
The essential data integration procedure known as extract, transform, and load, or ETL, aims to combine data from several sources into a single, central repository. The process entails gathering data, cleaning and reforming it by common business principles, and loading it into a database or data warehouse.
- Extract: This step involves data extraction from various source systems, such as databases, files, APIs, or other data repositories. The extracted data may be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured.
- Transform: During this step, the extracted data is transformed into a suitable format for analysis and reporting. This includes cleaning, filtering, aggregating, and applying business rules to ensure accuracy and consistency.
- Load: This includes loading the transformed data into a target data warehouse, database, or other data repository, where it can be used for querying and analysis by end-users and applications.
Using ETL operations, you can analyze raw datasets in the appropriate format required for analytics and gain insightful knowledge. This makes work more straightforward when researching demand trends, changing customer preferences, keeping up with the newest styles, and ensuring regulations are followed.
With Hevo, setting up and managing your automated ETL data pipeline is a breeze through a simple three-step process. It converts data into an analysis-ready format without requiring any coding.
Trusted by over 2000 customers, Hevo offers the following advantages:
- Real-Time Data Sync: Continuous data synchronization ensures your analytics are always current.
- User-Friendly Interface: Manage and oversee your integrations easily with a clear and intuitive interface.
- Security: Hevo adheres to essential certifications, including GDPR, SOC II, and HIPAA, ensuring your data remains secure.
Get Started with Hevo for Free
What are the Types of ETL Tools
1. Open-Source ETL Tools
Open-source ETL tools are community-driven solutions that provide cost-effective ways to extract, transform, and load data. These tools, like Apache Nifi, Airbyte, and Talend Open Studio, offer flexibility and customization for organizations looking to tailor ETL processes to specific needs. Their transparency fosters innovation, but they may require advanced technical expertise and dedicated maintenance.
2. Cloud-Based ETL Tools
Cloud-based ETL tools operate on cloud platforms, enabling organizations to seamlessly handle data integration without managing physical infrastructure. Tools like Hevo Data, Fivetran, and AWS Glue offer scalability, automatic updates, and compatibility with diverse data sources. They are ideal for businesses seeking efficiency and real-time capabilities but may involve recurring costs.
3. Custom ETL Tools
Custom ETL tools are in-house solutions built to address unique business requirements, offering complete control over the ETL process. These tools cater to highly specific workflows and integrate deeply into existing systems, ensuring tailored functionality. However, they require significant development effort, skilled resources, and ongoing maintenance.
4. Enterprise Software ETL Tools
Enterprise ETL tools, such as Informatica PowerCenter and IBM DataStage, are robust solutions designed for large-scale organizations handling complex data needs. They offer advanced features like metadata management, real-time processing, and strong governance. These tools provide reliability and support but often come with higher costs and implementation overhead.
Top 21 Best ETL Tools that Data Engineers Can Consider
1. Hevo Data
Hevo Data is one of the most highly rated ELT platforms that allows teams to rely on timely analytics and data-driven decisions. You can replicate streaming data from 150+ Data Sources, including BigQuery, Redshift, etc., to the destination of your choice without writing a single line of code. The platform processes 450 billion records and supports dynamic scaling of workloads based on user requirements. Hevo’s architecture ensures the optimal usage of system resources to get the best return on your investment. Hevo’s intuitive user interface caters to more than 2000+ customers across 45 countries.
Key features:
- Data Streaming: Hevo Data supports real-time data streaming, enabling businesses to ingest and process data from multiple sources in real-time. This ensures that the data in the target systems is always up-to-date, facilitating timely insights and decision-making.
- Reliability: Hevo provides robust error handling and data validation mechanisms to ensure data accuracy and consistency. Any errors encountered during the ETL process are logged and can be addressed promptly.
- Cost-effectiveness: Hevo offers transparent and straightforward pricing plans that cater to businesses of all sizes. The pricing is based on the volume of data processed, ensuring that businesses only pay for what they use.
Pricing:
Hevo provides the following pricing plan:
- Free
- Starter- $239/per month
- Professional- $679/per month
- Business Critical- Contact sales
2. Apache Airflow
Apache Airflow is an open-source platform bridging orchestration and management in complex data workflows. Originally designed to serve the requirements of Airbnb’s data infrastructure, it is now being maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. Airflow is one of the most used tools for data engineers, data scientists, and DevOps practitioners looking to automate pipelines related to data engineering.
Key Features:
- Easy useability: Just a little knowledge of Python is required to deploy airflow.
- Open Source: It is an open-source platform, making it free to use and resulting in many active users.
- Numerous Integrations: Platforms like Google Cloud, Amazon AWS, and many more can be readily integrated using the available integrations.
Pricing: Free
3. Singer
Singer is an open-source standard for moving data between databases, web APIs, files, queues, etc. The Singer spec describes how data extraction scripts—called “Taps”—and data loading scripts—“Targets”—should communicate using a standard JSON-based data format over stdout. By conforming to this spec, Taps and Targets can be used in any combination to move data from any source to any destination.
Key Features:
- Unix-inspired: Singer taps and targets are simple applications composed of pipes—no daemons or complicated plugins needed.
- JSON-based: Singer applications communicate with JSON, making them easy to work with and implement in any programming language.
- Efficient: Singer makes maintaining a state between invocations to support incremental extraction easy.
Pricing: Free
3. Airbyte
Airbyte is one of the best data integration and replication tools for setting up seamless data pipelines. This leading open-source platform offers a catalog of 350+ pre-built connectors. Although the catalog library is expansive, you can still build a custom connector to data sources and destinations not in the pre-built list. Creating a custom connector takes a few minutes because Airbyte makes the task easy.
Key Features:
- Multiple Sources: Airbyte can easily consolidate numerous sources. You can quickly bring your datasets together at your chosen destination if your datasets are spread over various locations.
- Massive variety of connectors: Airbyte offers 350+ pre-built and custom connectors.
- Open Source: Free to use, and with open source, you can edit connectors and build new connectors in less than 30 minutes without needing separate systems.
Pricing:
It offers various pricing models:
- Open Source- Free
- Cloud—It offers a free trial and charges $360/mo for a 30GB volume of data replicated per month.
- Team- Talk to the sales team for the pricing details
- Enterprise- Talk to the sales team for the pricing details
Infinity Brands transitioned from Airbyte to Hevo to unlock seamless, automated data integration that empowered them to grow by 63% across all their managed brands. With Hevo’s no-code platform, they were able to streamline their data operations, reporting an impressive $26M turnover in just one year while developing a comprehensive business statistics site for in-depth analysis. You can read about the complete success story.
5. Meltano
Meltano is an open-source ETL tool that simplifies data integration processes. Data engineers can completely control and visualize the pipelines. It helps discover, move, prepare, and integrate data from any source to any destination, as its workflow is built around a Git repository, CLI, and YAML files. It has a massive library of open-source connectors and an SDK for custom connectors. This tool can be deployed on Meltano Cloud or self-managed.
Key Features:
- pip-installable: Meltano is pip-installable and has a prepackaged docker container, so you can build a pipeline in minutes.
- Integration: It supports data sources and destinations with over 300 connectors. Also, dbt is natively available.
- Customizable: It offers SDK, which you can use to build custom connectors according to your requirements.
Pricing: Free
Move Your Data from MySQL to Snowflake
Migrate Your Data from HubSpot to Databricks
Move Your Data from MS SQL Server to BigQuery
6. Hadoop
Apache Hadoop is an open-source framework for efficiently storing and processing large datasets ranging in size from gigabytes to petabytes. Instead of using one large computer to store and process the data, Hadoop allows clustering multiple computers to analyze massive datasets in parallel more quickly. It offers four modules: Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Yet Another Resource Negotiator (YARN), MapReduce, and Hadoop Common.
Key Features:
- Scalable and cost-effective: Can handle large datasets at a lower cost.
- Strong community support: Hadoop offers wide adoption and a robust community.
- Suitable for handling massive amounts of data: Efficient for large-scale data processing.
Pricing: Free
7. Informatica PowerCenter
Informatica PowerCenter is a common data integration platform widely used for enterprise data warehousing and data governance. PowerCenter’s powerful capabilities enable organizations to integrate data from different sources into a consistent, accurate, and accessible format. PowerCenter is built to manage complicated data integration jobs. Informatica uses integrated, high-quality data to power business growth and enable better-informed decision-making.
Key Features:
- Role-based: Informatica’s role-based tools and agile processes enable businesses to deliver timely, trusted data to other companies.
- Collaboration: Informatica allows analysts to collaborate with IT to prototype and validate results rapidly and iteratively.
- Extensive support: Support for grid computing, distributed processing, high availability, adaptive load balancing, dynamic partitioning, and pushdown optimization
Pricing:
Informatica supports volume-based pricing. It also offers a free plan and three different paid plans for cloud data management.
8. AWS Glue
AWS Glue is a serverless data integration platform that helps analytics users discover, move, prepare, and integrate data from various sources. It can be used for analytics, application development, and machine learning. It includes additional productivity and data operations tools for authoring, running jobs, and implementing business workflows.
Key Features:
- Auto-detect schema: AWS Glue uses crawlers that automatically detect and integrate schema information into the AWS Glue Data Catalog.
- Transformations: AWS Glue visually transforms data with a job canvas interface
- Scalability: AWS Glue supports dynamic scaling of resources based on workloads
Pricing:
AWS Glue supports plans based on hourly rating, billed by the second, for crawlers (discovering data) and extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs (processing and loading data).
9. IBM DataStage
IBM DataStage is an industry-leading data integration tool that helps you design, develop, and run jobs that move and transform data. At its core, the DataStage tool mainly helps extract, transform, and load (ETL) and extract, load, and transform (ELT) patterns.
Key features:
- Data flows: IBM DataStage helps design data flows that extract information from multiple source systems, transform the data as required, and deliver the data to target databases or applications.
- Easy connect: It helps connect directly to enterprise applications as sources or targets to ensure the data is complete, relevant, and accurate.
- Time and consistency: It helps reduce development time and improves the consistency of design and deployment by using prebuilt functions.
Pricing:
IBM DataStage’s pricing model is based on capacity unit hours. It also supports a free plan for small data.
Extract, Transform, and Load Data in Minutes!
No credit card required
10. Azure Data Factory
Azure Data Factory is a serverless data integration software that supports a pay-as-you-go model that scales to meet computing demands. The service offers no-code and code-based interfaces and can pull data from over 90 built-in connectors. It is also integrated with Azure Synapse analytics, which helps perform analytics on the integrated data.
Key Features
- No-code pipelines: Provide services to develop no-code ETL and ELT pipelines with built-in Git and support for continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD).
- Flexible pricing: Supports a fully managed, pay-as-you-go serverless cloud service that supports auto-scaling on the user’s demand.
- Autonomous support: Supports autonomous ETL to gain operational efficiencies and enable citizen integrators.
Pricing:
Azure Data Factory supports free and paid pricing plans based on user’s requirements. Their plans include:
- Lite
- Standard
- Small Enterprise Bundle
- Medium Enterprise Bundle
- Large Enterprise Bundle
- DataStage
11. Google Cloud DataFlow
Google Cloud Dataflow is a fully optimized data processing service built to enhance computing power and automate resource management. The service aims to lower processing costs by automatically scaling resources to meet demand and offering flexible scheduling. Furthermore, when the data is transformed, Google Cloud Dataflow provides AI capabilities to identify real-time anomalies and perform predictive analysis.
Key Features:
- Real-time AI: Dataflow supports real-time AI capabilities, allowing real-time reactions with near-human intelligence to various events.
- Latency: Dataflow helps minimize pipeline latency, maximize resource utilization, and reduce processing cost per data record with data-aware resource autoscaling.
- Continuous Monitoring: This involves monitoring and observing the data at each step of a Dataflow pipeline to diagnose problems and troubleshoot effectively using actual data samples.
Pricing:
Google Cloud Dataflow uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model that provides flexibility and scalability for data processing tasks.
12. Stitch
Stitch is a cloud-first, open-source platform for rapidly moving data. It is a service for integrating data that gathers information from more than 130 platforms, services, and apps. The program centralized this data in a data warehouse, eliminating the need for manual coding. Stitch is open-source, allowing development teams to extend the tool to support additional sources and features.
Key Features:
- Flexible schedule: Stitch provides easy scheduling of when you need the data replicated.
- Fault tolerance: Resolves issues automatically and alerts users when required in case of detected errors
- Continuous monitoring: Monitors the replication process with detailed extraction logs and loading reports
Pricing:
Stitch provides the following pricing plan:
- Standard-$100/ month
- Advanced-$1250 annually
- Premium-$2500 annually
13. Oracle data integrator
Oracle Data Integrator is a comprehensive data integration platform covering all data integration requirements:
- High-volume, high-performance batch loads
- Event-driven, trickle-feed integration processes
- SOA-enabled data services
In addition, it has built-in connections with Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Warehouse Builder and allows parallel job execution for speedier data processing.
Key Features:
- Parallel processing: ODI supports parallel processing, allowing multiple tasks to run concurrently and enhancing performance for large data volumes.
- Connectors: ODI provides connectors and adapters for various data sources and targets, including databases, big data platforms, cloud services, and more. This ensures seamless integration across diverse environments.
- Transformation: ODI provides Advanced Data Transformation Capabilities
Pricing:
Oracle data integrator provides service prices at the customer’s request.
14. Integrate.io
Integrate.io is a leading low-code data pipeline platform that provides ETL services to businesses. Its constantly updated data offers insightful information for the organization to make decisions and perform activities like lowering its CAC, increasing its ROAS, and driving go-to-market success.
Key Features:
- User-Friendly Interface: Integrate.io offers a low-code, simple drag-and-drop user interface and transformation features – like sort, join, filter, select, limit, clone, etc. —that simplify the ETL and ELT process.
- API connector: Integrate.io provides a REST API connector that allows users to connect to and extract data from any REST API.
- Order of action: Integrate.io’s low-code and no-code workflow creation interface allows you to specify the order of actions to be completed and the circumstances under which they should be completed using dropdown choices.
Pricing:
Integrate.io provides four elaborate pricing models such as:
- Starter-$2.99/credit
- Professional-$0.62/credit
- Expert-$0.83/credit
- Business Critical-custom
15. Fivetran
Fivetran’s platform of valuable tools is designed to make your data management process more convenient. Within minutes, the user-friendly software retrieves the most recent information from your database, keeping up with API updates. In addition to ETL tools, Fivetran provides database replication, data security services, and round-the-clock support.
Key Features:
- Connectors: Fivetran makes data extraction easier by maintaining compatibility with hundreds of connectors.
- Automated data cleaning: Fivetran automatically looks for duplicate entries, incomplete data, and incorrect data, making the data-cleaning process more accessible for the user.
- Data transformation: Fivetran’s feature makes analyzing data from various sources easier.
Pricing:
Fivetran offers the following pricing plans:
- Free
- Starter
- Standard
- Enterprise
Postman shifted from Fivetran to Hevo, saving 30-40 hours of developer effort each month with Hevo’s intuitive, no-code interface. Analysts at Postman, even with limited experience, can now set up new data sources within an hour. With Hevo’s extensive coverage of 150+ connectors, it has become a one-stop solution for integrating data from over 40 sources seamlessly and efficiently. You can check out their complete Success Story.
16. Pentaho Data Integration (PDI)
Pentaho Data Integration(PDI) is more than just an ETL tool. It is a codeless data orchestration tool that blends diverse data sets into a single source of truth as a basis for analysis and reporting.
Users can design data jobs and transformations using the PDI client, Spoon, and then run them using Kitchen. For example, the PDI client can be used for real-time ETL with Pentaho Reporting.
Key Features:
- Flexible Data Integration: Users can easily prepare, build, deploy, and analyze their data.
- Intelligent Data Migration: Pentaho relies heavily on multi-cloud-based and hybrid architectures. By using Pentaho, you can accelerate your data movements across hybrid cloud environments.
- Scalability: You can quickly scale out with enterprise-grade, secure, and flexible data management.
Pricing:
The software is available in a free community edition and a subscription-based enterprise edition. Users can choose one based on their needs.
17. Dataddo
Dataddo is a fully managed, no-code integration platform that syncs cloud-based services, dashboarding apps, data warehouses, and data lakes. It helps the users visualize, centralize, distribute, and activate data by automating its transfer from virtually any source to any destination. Dataddo’s no-code platform is intuitive for business users and robust enough for data engineers, making it perfect for any data-driven organization.
Key Features:
- Certified and Fully Secure: Dataddo is SOC 2 Type II certified and compliant with all significant data privacy laws around the globe.
- Offers various connectors: Dataddo offers 300+ off-the-shelf connectors, no matter your payment plan. Users can also request that the necessary connector be built if unavailable.
- Highly scalable and Future-proof: Users can operate with any cloud-based tools they use now or in the future. They can use any connector from the ever-growing portfolio.
Pricing:
Offers various pricing models to meet user’s needs.
- Free
- Data to Dashboards- $99.0/month
- Data Anywhere- $99.0/month
- Headless Data Integration: Custom
18. Qlik
Qlik’s Data Integration Platform automates real-time data streaming, refinement, cataloging, and publishing between multiple source systems and Google Cloud. It drives agility in analytics through automated data pipelines that provide real-time data streaming from the most comprehensive source systems (including SAP, Mainframe, RDBMS, Data Warehouse, etc.) and automates the transformation to analytics-ready data across Google Cloud.
Key Features:
- Real-Time Data for Faster, Better Insights: Qlik delivers large volumes of real-time, analytics-ready data into streaming and cloud platforms, data warehouses, and data lakes.
- Agile Data Delivery: Qlik enables the creation of analytics-ready data pipelines across multi-cloud and hybrid environments, automating data lakes, warehouses, and intelligent designs to reduce manual errors.
- Enterprise-grade security and governance: Qlik helps users discover, remediate, and share trusted data with simple self-service tools to automate data processes and help ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
Pricing:
It offers three pricing options to its users:
- Stitch Data Loader
- Qlik Data Integration
- Talend Data Fabric
19. Portable.io
Portable builds custom no-code integrations, ingesting data from SaaS providers and many other data sources that might not be supported because other ETL providers overlook them. Potential customers can see their extensive connector catalog of over 1300+ hard-to-find ETL connectors. Portable enables efficient and timely data management and offers robust scalability and high performance.
Key Features:
- Massive Variety of pre-built connectors: Bespoke connectors built and maintained at no cost.
- Visual workflow editor: It provides a graphical interface that is simple to use to create ETL procedures.
- Real-Time Data Integration: It supports real-time data updates and synchronization.
Pricing:
It offers three pricing models to its customers:
- Starter: $290/month
- Scale: $1,490/month
- Custom Pricing
20. Skyvia
Skyvia is a Cloud-based web service that provides data-based solutions for integration, backup, management, and connectivity. Its areas of expertise include ELT and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) import tools for advanced mapping configurations.
It provides wizard-based data integration throughout databases and cloud applications with no coding. It aims to help small businesses securely manage data from disparate sources with a cost-effective service.
Key Features:
- Suitable for businesses of all sizes: Skyvia offers different pricing plans for businesses of various sizes and needs, and every company can find a suitable one.
- Always available: Hosted in reliable Azure cloud and multi-tenant fault-tolerant cloud architecture, Skyvia is always online.
- Easy access to on-premise data: Users can connect Skyvia to local data sources via a secure agent application without re-configuring the firewall, port forwarding, and other network settings.
Pricing:
It Provides five pricing options to its users:
- Free
- Basic: $70/month
- Standard: $159/month
- Professional: $199/month
- Enterprise: Contact the team for pricing information.
21. Matillion
Matillion is one of the best cloud-native ETL tools designed for the cloud. It can work seamlessly on all significant cloud-based data platforms, such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse, and Delta Lake on Databricks. Matillion’s intuitive interface reduces maintenance and overhead costs by running all data jobs in the cloud.
Key Features:
- ELT/ETL and reverse ETL
- PipelineOS/Agents: Users can dynamically scale with Matillion’s PipelineOS, the operating system for your pipelines. Distribute individual pipeline tasks across multiple stateless containers to match the data workload and allocate only necessary resources.
- High availability: By configuring high-availability Matillion clustered instances, users can keep Matillion running, even if components temporarily fail.
Pricing:
It provides three packages:
- Basic- $2.00/credit
- Advanced- $2.50/credit
- Enterprise- $2.70/credit
Comparison of All 21 ETL Tools
Tool | Ease of Use | Support | Integration Capabilities | Pricing |
Hevo Data | User-friendly interface, No-code | 24/7 customer support, comprehensive | Supports 150+ data sources, real-time data | Free Trial, Transparent tier-based pricing |
Apache Airflow | Complex, requires expertise | Community support, some enterprise | Highly customizable, many integrations | Free, open-source |
Singer | Easy, but requires scripting | Community support | Open-source connectors, 100 sources, 10 major destinations. | Free, open-source |
Airbyte | Easy, open-source, customizable | Community support | 350+ pre-built connectors | Free, open-source |
Meltano | Easy, open-source, customizable | Community support | 300+ pre-built connectors, customizable connectors | Free, open-source |
Hadoop | Complex, high technical expertise | Community support, some enterprise | Highly scalable, integrates with many tools | Open-source, but can be costly to manage |
Informatica PowerCenter | Complex- requires expertise | Extensive support options, community | Highly scalable, 200 pre-built connectors | Expensive, enterprise-focused |
AWS Glue | Moderate, some technical knowledge required | AWS support, documentation, community | Integrates well with the AWS ecosystem, 70+ data sources. | Pay-as-you-go, cost-effective for AWS users |
IBM DataStage | Complex, requires expertise | Robust support, comprehensive | Extensive integration capabilities | Enterprise pricing, typically expensive |
Azure Data Factory | Moderate, Azure knowledge needed | Microsoft support, community | Integrates well with Azure services, 90+ connectors. | Pay-as-you-go, flexible pricing |
Google Cloud Dataflow | Moderate, technical knowledge is needed | Google Cloud support, community | Integrates with GCP services | Pay-as-you-go, flexible pricing |
Stitch | Easy, simple UI | Standard support, community forums | Integrates with many data warehouses and supports 130+ connectors. | Transparent, tiered pricing |
Oracle Data Integrator | Complex, requires Oracle ecosystem knowledge | Oracle support, community forums | Best with Oracle products, broad integration | Enterprise pricing, typically expensive |
Integrate.io | Easy, drag-and-drop interface | 24/7 support, extensive documentation | Many pre-built connectors and 100+ SaaS applications. | Subscription-based, flexible pricing |
Fivetran | Very easy, automated | 24/7 support, extensive documentation | Supports 400+ data connectors, automated ELT | Subscription-based, transparent pricing |
Pentaho Data Integration | Moderate, some learning curve | Comprehensive support, community | Integrates with many databases and services | Subscription-based, tiered pricing |
Dataddo | Very easy, no coding required | 24/7 support, extensive documentation | Wide range of connectors | Subscription-based, transparent pricing |
Qlik | Moderate, some learning curve | Good support, community forums | Wide range of data connectors | Subscription-based, typically expensive |
Portable.io | Easy, customizable, low-code | Standard support, extensive documentation | Supports many data sources, real-time | Subscription-based, transparent pricing |
Skyvia | Easy, intuitive interface | Standard support, community forums | Supports cloud and on-premises sources | Transparent, tiered pricing |
Matillion | Easy, visual interface | Good support, extensive documentation | Strong integration with cloud platforms, 100+ connectors | Subscription-based, varies by cloud |
Criteria for choosing the right ETL Tool
Choosing the right ETL tool for your company is crucial. These tools automate the data migration process, allowing you to schedule integrations in advance or execute them live. This automation frees you from tedious tasks like data extraction and import, enabling you to focus on more critical tasks. To help you make an informed decision, learn about some of the popular ETL solutions available in the market.
- Cost: Organizations selecting an ETL tool should consider not only the initial price but also the long-term costs of infrastructure and labor. An ETL solution with higher upfront costs but lower maintenance and downtime may be more economical. Conversely, free, open source ETL tools might require significant upkeep.
- Usability: The tool should be intuitive and easy to use, allowing technical and non-technical users to navigate and operate it with minimal training. Look for interfaces that are clean, well-organized, and visually appealing.
- Data Quality: The tool should provide robust data cleansing, validation, and transformation capabilities to ensure high data quality. Effective data quality management leads to more accurate and reliable analysis.
- Performance: The tool should be able to handle large data volumes efficiently. Performance benchmarks and scalability options are critical, especially as your data needs grow.
Future Trends in ETL Tools
- Data Integration and Orchestration: The change from ETL to ELT is just one example of how the traditional ETL environment will change. To build ETL for the future, we need to focus on the data streams rather than the tools. We must account for real-time latency, source control, schema evolution, and continuous integration and deployment.
- Automation and AI in ETL: Artificial intelligence and machine learning will no doubt dramatically change traditional ETL technologies within a few years. Solutions automate data transformation tasks, enhancing accuracy and reducing manual intervention in ETL procedures. Predictive analytics further empowers ETL solutions to project data integration challenges and develop better methods for improvement.
- Real-time Processing: Yet another trend will move ETL technologies away from batch processing and towards introducing continuous data streams with real-time data processing technologies.
- Cloud-Native ETL: Cloud-native ETL solutions will provide organizations with scale, flexibility, and cost savings. Organizations embracing serverless architectures will minimize administrative tasks on infrastructure and increase their focus on data processing agility.
- Self-Service ETL: With the rise in automated ETL platforms, people with low/no technical knowledge can also implement ETL technologies to streamline their data processing. This will reduce the pressure on the engineering team to build pipelines and help businesses focus on performing analysis.
Conclusion
ETL pipelines form the foundation for organizations’ decision-making procedures. This step is essential to prepare raw data for storage and analytics. ETL solutions make it easier to do sophisticated analytics, optimize data processing, and promote end-user satisfaction.
Looking to grasp the different types of ETL tools? Our guide offers a detailed look at various options to help you find the best fit for your data needs.
You must choose the best ETL tool to make your company’s most significant strategic decisions. Selecting the right ETL tool depends on your data integration needs, budget, and existing technology stack.
The tools listed above represent some of the best options available in 2025, each with its unique strengths and features. Hevo helps you create your pipelines in minutes without the need for coding. Try Hevo’s full features with a 14-Day Free Trial!
Understand the different capabilities provide for data extraction, transformation, and loading. Whether you’re dealing with cloud-based or on-premise solutions, the right tool can make a significant difference in managing large volumes of data efficiently. For a more comprehensive understanding of ETL Tools and related terminology, check out our Data Glossary, where we cover key terms and concepts essential to mastering ETL processes.
FAQ on ETL tools
What is ETL and its tools?
ETL stands for Extract, Transform, Load. It’s a process used to move data from one place to another while transforming it into a useful format. Popular ETL tools include:
1. Hevo Data: Robust, enterprise-level.
2. Pentaho Data Integration: Open-source, user-friendly.
3. Apache Nifi: Good for real-time data flows.
4. AWS Glue: Serverless ETL service.
Is SQL an ETL tool?
Not really. SQL is a language for managing and querying databases. While you can use SQL for the transformation part of ETL, it’s not an ETL tool.
Which ETL tool is used most?
It depends on the use case, but popular tools include Hevo Data, Apache Nifi, and AWS Glue.
What are ELT tools?
ELT stands for Extract, Load, Transform. It’s like ETL, but you load the data first and transform it into the target system. Tools for ELT include Hevo Data, Azure Data Factory, Matillion, Apache Airflow, and IBM DataStage
With over a decade of experience, Sarad has been instrumental in designing and developing Hevo's fundamental components. His expertise lies in building lean solutions for various software challenges. Sarad is passionate about mentoring fellow engineers and continually exploring new technologies to stay at the forefront of the industry. His dedication and innovative approach have made significant contributions to Hevo's success.