Best alternatives to Airbyte

Data integration is a key step for any company looking to make better use of its data. It involves collecting and consolidating information from multiple sources.

Airbyte has established itself as one of the leading tools in this field. Flexible, open source, and backed by a large developer community, it’s a popular choice for many data teams.

But like any solution, Airbyte has its limitations and may not meet every need. Other platforms offer different approaches — some of which may be better suited to specific contexts.

🔎 Learn about Airbyte’s core features, what makes it strong and where it falls short. Explore the best alternatives to find the right fit for your data stack. 💡

Airbyte was founded in 2020 in San Francisco by two French entrepreneurs: Michel Tricot (ex-LiveRamp) and Jean Lafleur.

From their previous experiences, they identified two key trends:

Airbyte was created to address the “buy or build” dilemma and streamline data integration. The tool quickly gained traction thanks to its open-source positioning and highly active developer community.

In less than three years, the platform reached nearly 30,000 users and hundreds of GitHub contributors. It now offers over 500 data connectors (sources and destinations), a no-code connector builder, and developer-focused interfaces.

Often positioned as an open-source alternative to Fivetran, Airbyte aims for a more modular and flexible model. Its founders now describe it as an open data movement platform, with the ambition to cover the entire data value chain from ingestion to activation (Reverse ETL), much like Rivery.

Like Rudderstack, Airbyte is built on an open-source model. However, that doesn’t mean the tool is completely free. The open-source, self-hosted version is freely available and suitable for technical teams able to manage infrastructure and maintenance.

For companies seeking more features and ease of use, Airbyte offers a hosted Cloud version, with usage-based pricing. This lets teams focus on pipelines without managing technical aspects.

More advanced plans (Teams and Enterprise) include additional features such as user management, enhanced security, multi-user access, and premium support.

Airbyte thus combines the openness of open-source with commercial offers tailored to the scalability and compliance needs of large organisations.

Airbyte can extract and load data from hundreds of sources into destinations such as BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or PostgreSQL. Its architecture follows an ELT approach: data is extracted and loaded first, then transformed in the target warehouse.

It mainly operates in batch mode, with synchronisations scheduled at regular intervals. For some sources, Change Data Capture (CDC) enables more efficient syncs by transferring only the data modified since the last run.

An alerting system helps manage pipeline failures. Connectors are regularly updated by the Airbyte team and its active community, ensuring broad coverage and continuous improvement.

From the outset, Airbyte has stood out for its ability to quickly provide or adapt connectors to meet the specific needs of each company. The platform offers several tools to facilitate customisation:

Since version 1.0, an AI-assisted feature helps pre-fill certain creation steps. The open-source approach guarantees high flexibility, especially valuable for companies dealing with rare or proprietary pipelines.

Airbyte offers several ways to manage pipelines, depending on user preferences and technical skill levels:

These features make Airbyte particularly popular among technical teams seeking granular control over data ingestion.

Airbyte is adapting to the needs of generative AI, with connectors and features designed for unstructured data pipelines:

These capabilities make it an increasingly relevant tool for feeding AI applications built on documents or enriched content.

Airbyte has become a widely recognised solution in just a few years. However, it does have certain limitations depending on the user and use case.

Finally, although Airbyte is praised for its data integration connectors, its capabilities around data activation remain limited.

Historically, Airbyte has focused on data ingestion and ELT pipelines. Data activation — i.e. sending data back to business tools — was not part of its initial positioning.

A first step was announced at the end of 2024 with the release of version 1.0. The aim is to expand the platform's scope, notably by encouraging contributions around Reverse ETL use cases.

However, as of now, these activation-related features are still barely visible in the documentation or on the vendor’s website. Setting up Reverse ETL pipelines requires technical resources, and marketing teams are still waiting for a simple, business-friendly interface.

Before choosing an alternative, start by clarifying your needs. Are you focused on data ingestion, analysis, or activation?

Each platform offers a different approach, with features tailored to different audiences — from data engineers to growth or marketing teams. Flexibility, governance, hosting model, and budget can also vary. The right solution depends on your context.

These are tools primarily designed to automate data extraction and loading into data warehouses.

Fivetran is a market leader in ELT, praised for its 700+ managed connectors and easy deployment without infrastructure management. It offers a smooth experience with advanced monitoring, logging, and alerting tools.

In May 2025, Fivetran acquired Census to expand into data activation. While powerful, the platform can lack flexibility and become costly at scale.

Talend is a well-established data integration tool designed for complex environments. It offers a rich library of connectors, data quality and preparation tools, and strong governance and compliance features.

Talend is aimed at large IT projects with stringent security requirements, but remains a technical solution that is less aligned with Modern Data Stack standards.

DinMo is a composable CDP that helps teams operationalise their data across all channels. It enables marketing teams to activate the data stored in their data warehouse without relying on technical resources.

The solution offers simple, fast Reverse ETL deployment, compatible with platforms like Meta Ads, Google Ads, HubSpot, and Klaviyo. Its Customer Hub allows teams to create dynamic segments, automate campaigns, and track omnichannel performance using AI.

Designed for non-technical users, DinMo offers many advantages: it shortens campaign time-to-market and gives marketing teams greater autonomy in a secure and compliant framework. It’s the perfect complement to an integration tool like Airbyte.

Rudderstack is an infrastructure CDP aimed at developers, covering the full spectrum from integration to activation. It supports real-time data collection, customer profile unification, and activation across various tools.

The platform is open-source by design, and deployment requires strong engineering expertise. It’s more comprehensive than Airbyte when it comes to activation, but still primarily suited to technical teams.

Rivery is a SaaS platform covering the full data lifecycle: ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and activation via Reverse ETL. It allows users to build no-code workflows, with an AI assistant guiding the configuration process.

More complete than Airbyte, it remains a premium tool with a technical interface, less focused on marketing-specific use cases. Unlike Airbyte, Rivery is not open source.

Airbyte is a solid solution for data ingestion, particularly suited to technical teams. However, for marketing activation or Reverse ETL needs, other tools may offer greater simplicity and business value.

The best choice depends on your use cases, technical resources, and business goals.

👉 Discover how DinMo helps you activate your customer data with full autonomy.