Do you know which is the best ETL tool in the market? Are you confused between Fivetran, Hevo, and Segment? If yes, then you are in the right place as this blog tackles the differences between the three leading ETL service providers. All these tools offer similar features but have slight variations in their pricing, security, transformation, etc.
In this blog, you will compare the top-notch pipelines – Fivetran, Segment and Hevo on the basics of some crucial factors, including features, pricing, and transformations. By the end of this section, you will be able to decide your pipeline that fulfils your requirements.
A Summarised Comparison of Fivetran, Segment & Hevo Data
|  |  |  |
| Platform Focus | Data Ingestion, ELT, ETL | Data Ingestion & ELT | Event Tracking, Data Ingestion & ELT |
| SaaS Data Sources | About 150 | 120+ | 100+ |
| Support for Data lakes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Data Transformation | Both ETL & ELT | ELT | ELT |
| Data Security Certifications/ Compliance | HIPAA, GDPR & SOC II | GDPR & SOC I/II | GDPR & CCPA |
| SLA Support | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pricing | Events & Paid Sources-based. Transparent Pricing | Credit/Consumption-based. Transparent Pricing | Monthly Tracked Visitor-based. Transparent Pricing |
| Purchase Proces | Self Service or By Contacting Sales Team | Self Service or By Contacting Sales Team | Self Service or By Contacting Sales Team |
| Free Trial | Yes, 14-day free trial | Yes, 14-day free trial | Yes, 14-day free trial |
| Vendor Lock-in | No Lock-in – Flexible subscription plans | Monthly or Annual Contracts Only | No |
| Developer Tools | REST APIs | REST APIs only for Enterprise Subscription | HTTP Tracking API, Objects & Bulk API,
Pixel Tracking API, Mobile SDKs |
| Platform Training | Users can request a Platform Demo by contacting support,
Demo Videos on YouTube and
Implementation & Setup-based Documentation | No | No |
Introduction to Hevo Data
Image Source: https://hevodata.com/
Hevo Data, a No-code Data Pipeline, helps to transfer data from 150+ sources (Including 40+ Free Data Sources) to a data warehouse of your choice to visualize it in your desired BI tool. Hevo is fully-managed and completely automates the process of not only loading data from your desired source but also enriching the data and transforming it into an analysis-ready form without having to write a single line of code. Its fault-tolerant architecture ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.
It provides a consistent & reliable solution to manage data in real-time and always have analysis-ready data in your desired destination. It allows you to focus on key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools such as Tableau, Power BI, and many more.
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Introduction to Fivetran
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Fivetran is a cloud-based ETL tool founded in the year 2012. It is a zero-maintenance pipeline which allows businesses of all sizes to collect, transform, and analyse their data by connecting your database, applications, files, etc. to a centralised data warehouse. It offers SQL based transformation, automatic schema detection, incremental batch updates, etc. It provides direct integration and sends your data to your destination over a secured network.
Introduction to Segment
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Segment is a Customer Data Platform (CDP). It provides services that can simplify the process of collecting and using data from various properties. Segment allows extracting, transforming, archiving, and loading the data from your marketing analytics, data warehousing tools and unifies it to provide a single viewpoint. Segment usually collects user events from your mobile and web applications and provides complete data to all the teams in your organisation.
Features
Fivetran
Fivetran built robust and automated pipelines that allow you to focus on analytics. Fivetran offers agility, consistency, and reliability. Pipeline failures will never compromise your analytics project as they will monitor and maintain them 24×7. Fivetran is instantly scalable and offers volume-neutral pricing to facilitate your scaling. They also offer enterprise-level security and allow data purge after every sync.
Fivetran allows automatic schema detection from your APIS and application. It incrementally updates data sources instead of loading full data dump from databases and APIs. As they normalise your schema, your data is always usable. If you suffer any delay, Fivetran will alert you immediately. You can know more about Fivetran features.
Segment
Segment provides one API for collecting analytics data from various platforms. They support SDKs for iOS, Android, JavaScript, and 20+ server languages. Segment simplifies your data collection by integrating the tools that you need for marketing, analytics, growth, etc. It will collect customer data using tagging, hence eliminating the need for code. It also provides data integrity by preventing data quality issues. It can be done with a tracking schema and enforcement of protocols.
It will improve your customer interaction by providing the audience to power a personalised experience. With Segment’s Function, you can customise your pipelines. They also accelerate their compliance by GDPR and CCPA. Segment is also scaled for more than 50 million API calls a month. Segment also provides scheduling of loads.
Hevo Data
Some of the top features of Hevo Data are mentioned below:
- Secure: Hevo has a fault-tolerant architecture that ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss. Hevo follows all industry standards and is HIPAA, GDPR & SOC II compliant.
- Real-Time Data Export: Hevo with its strong integration with 150+ sources(Including 40+ Free Data Sources), allows you to transfer data quickly & efficiently. This ensures efficient utilization of bandwidth on both ends.
- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
- Minimal Learning: Hevo with its simple and interactive UI, is extremely simple for new customers to work on and perform operations.
- Hevo Is Built To Scale: As the number of sources and the volume of your data grows, Hevo scales horizontally, handling millions of records per minute with very little latency.
- Incremental Data Load: Hevo allows the transfer of data that has been modified in real-time. This ensures efficient utilization of bandwidth on both ends.
- Live Support: The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to its customers through chat, email, and support calls.
- Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow and check where your data is at a particular point in time.
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Connectors
Fivetran
Fivetran supports 100+ data sources for data integration across all the platforms such as marketing and sales, databases, Saas applications, etc. It also allows a dozen destinations. If your required application, database or event is not a part of their connector, then you can request for it. Fivetran is optimised for data warehouses and BI tools and comes with predefined relationship entities for immediate report building. Know more about their integration.
Segment
Segment provides a single platform to collect, unify, connect, and integrate your entire customer data. You can get a full view of your customer’s data across apps, sales, payment, support, etc. Segment can track and send events between the 250 supported tools. You can replicate data from 100+ cloud sources. Segment supports six destinations, including Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, etc. Read more about connectors from here.
Hevo Data
Image Source: https://hevodata.com/
Hevo supports pre-built integration from 150+ data sources(40+ Free Data Sources), including databases, Saas applications, cloud storage, analytics, marketing tools, etc. Hevo’s destination includes Data Warehouses, like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Firebolt, Amazon Redshift, etc., and database-like PostgreSQL, MariaDB, etc. You can also request Hevo to add your application for the integration. Hevo supports all the marketing sources of Segment and databases of Fivetran at a reasonable price.
Pricing
Fivetran
Fivetran offers a transparent pricing model. There are three different pricing plans. The Starter plan is available at $1.00 per credit, which includes SQL-based transformations, 1-hour maximum sync frequency, 24×7 global support, etc. The Standard plan is available at $1.50 per credit and provides an automated connector for database sources, 15-minute maximum frequency, etc. You can also buy their Enterprise plan that is available at $2.00 per credit. It includes 5-minute data sync, SLA for data delivery, and 1 hour for support response. Know about their pricing.
Segment
You can create a free account that provides 1,000 visitors, 2 data sources and 300+ integrations. The Team plan starts at $120 per month and includes 10,000 visitors and unlimited sources. The Business plan allows customization by the customer. You can also request for the Business plan demo. Know more about Segment pricing from here.
Hevo Data
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Hevo offers three different pricing plans to you. The Basic Free Plan is available at no cost that includes unlimited free data sources and data models. The Starter plan is available at $239 per month for 5 million events/Month and goes up to $1159 per month for 100 Millon events, which includes unlimited data sources and data models. For more than 100 million events/Month, you can opt for the Business Plan that can scale according to your business needs with Custom Pricing. Hevo also provides a 14-day free trial to you. Know more about Hevo pricing here.
Data Transformation
Fivetran
Fivetran transformation provides all the necessary things required by the data team to achieve SQL-based transformations. After connecting to your data source, you can use a time-based schedule or trigger to automatically update transformation tables whenever some new data loads into the destination. As you know, Fivetran is an ELT (Extract, Load, and Transform), transformation occurs at the destination. In Fivetran, transformations refer to SQL scripts that are executed at the destination. The main task of transformation involves mapping data into a shape that makes it convenient for us to use it in the next pipeline elements.
Segment
Transformation in Segment irrevocably changes the event payloads that are flowing through Segment and immediately affect all the destinations or a single destination, depending on your properties. Segment allows transformation to be a powerful tool that complements a structured tracking plan. Transformation in Segment is not applied retroactively. However, you can manually extract and re-send your events. Transformation is available only to the Protocol customers. You can contact your Account executive or CSM to learn about it.
Hevo Data
Hevo’s Transformation involves the usage of models and workflows. Hevo allows you to transform your data before it replicates before the transformation. Hevo offers cleansing, data enrichment, re-expression, filtering, and normalisation of data with ease. Hevo will run your Python-based transformation code over each event received through pipelines. Once you complete the transformation code, you can test it against real samples. You can also test your code against events from a particular pipeline. After you are satisfied with your code, you can deploy it. You can also apply it to all the incoming data after deployment.
Apart from the Python-based Transformation, Hevo Data also offers easy-to-use Drag & Drop Transformations that don’t require you to write any code! This allows your Business Teams and Data Analysts to start performing transformations without the need for any prior technical programming knowledge. You can know more about data transformation at Hevo from here.
Data Security
Fivetran
Fivetran offers high enterprise-level security to keep your data safe and secure. They adhere to industrial standards while connecting, replicating and loading your data from any data sources. Connections to customers’ sources and destinations are SSL encrypted. Connection to customers’ Saas is encrypted using HTTPS. Read more about Fivetran security.
Segment
Segment offers security and privacy to their customers. They encrypt the data at rest, and it is protected by TLS in transit. Your password is hashed using bcrypt function. The projects of Segment pass through security design reviews, pen tests, and threat models using trusted security vendors. The product is centrally managed by Single Sign-On (SSO) on their Business plan. They also offer multi-factor authentication by providing an additional layer of security. You also have to enter a code from your mobiles to complete the process.
Hevo Data
Hevo follows strict policies for security and removal of customer data. All the credentials are encrypted with a key specific to a customer. All the connections with customers’ source and destination are encrypted through SSL. Sources and destinations connect using an SSH tunnel. All the connections to your Saas sources encrypt through HTTPS. Hevo uses Kafka to move data, and Kafka nodes are always encrypted. Hevo also offers two-factor authentication, and end-to-end encryption to enhance their security.
Support and Documentation
Fivetran
Fivetran supports you through an in-app form. You can also interact with the team via emails and calls only during the business hours of 8 A.M. to 3 P.M for US and Canada and 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. for the rest of the world. It doesn’t support 24×7 support.
You can also read their documentation for help. All the documentation are comprehensive and provide deeper explanations. Refer their documentation and clear all your doubts related to database, sources, security, etc.
Segment
You can email the support team about your technical issues, integration unavailability, website issues, billing and pricing, etc. Segment also provides technical documents, blogs, demos, etc. to assist you through your problem. Contact the support team of Segment from here.
The documentation includes a detailed description about their connections, partners, protocols, etc. You can also refer to Guides about Segment, usage and billing, Segment Workspace Admin, etc. If you want to know more about it refer to their documentation from here.
Hevo Data
Image Source: https://hevodata.com/
The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to their customer through emails, calls, and chats. Hevo integrates with Intercom and offers you product support and live chat. Click on the message icon at the bottom of the Asset Palette to connect with their support team and issue a query.
Hevo’s documentation and blogs are great assets. Hevo offers one of the most in-depth documentation to you, including transformations, data sources, destinations, pipelines, jobs, security, etc. Refer to this documentation to know more about them.
Conclusion
In this blog, you have learned about Fivetran, Segment, and Hevo. You also went through a detailed comparison of these three platforms. This comparison must have helped you to decide your pipeline. If you are looking for a fully-automated data pipeline that provides 24×7 support, then try Hevo.
Visit our Website to Explore Hevo
Hevo is a No-code Data Pipeline. It supports pre-built integration from 150+ data sources(Including 40+ Free Data Sources) at a reasonable price. With Hevo, the process of data integration becomes a cakewalk.
Sign Up for a 14-day free trial today and let Hevo take over the migration process.
Share your experience of using Fivetran, Segment, or Hevo with us in the comment section below.
Skand is a dedicated Customer Experience Engineer at Hevo Data, specializing in MySQL, Postgres, and REST APIs. With three years of experience, he efficiently troubleshoots customer issues, contributes to the knowledge base and SOPs, and assists customers in achieving their use cases through Hevo's platform.
