Best ETL Tools in 2026

Fivetran is a managed extract-load-transform (ELT) service: it runs prebuilt connectors that replicate data from SaaS applications, databases and files into a cloud warehouse or lake, and leaves most transformation to SQL models executed in the destination. Its connector page states that it moves data from more than 750 sources and can activate data back into more than 200 destinations. The pricing page lists Free, Standard, Enterprise and Business Critical plans; Standard includes 15-minute syncs and unlimited users, Enterprise adds one-minute syncs, custom roles, SCIM and hybrid deployment, and Business Critical adds customer-managed keys, PCI DSS Level 1 support and private networking.

On 1 June 2026 Fivetran completed its all-stock merger with dbt Labs, first announced on 13 October 2025; co-founder George Fraser is chief executive and dbt Labs co-founder Tristan Handy is president. The combined company says it serves more than 100,000 data teams, and the dbt Fusion engine runtime was released as dbt Core v2.0 (alpha) under the Apache 2.0 licence. The main limitation is cost predictability: billing is on monthly active rows (MAR), so high-churn tables can raise spend, and the published annual-contract table starts at US$12,000.

Informatica is one of the longest-established enterprise ETL vendors, and its cloud platform, Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), bundles data integration and engineering with API and application integration, data quality and observability, master data management, cataloguing, governance and a data marketplace. The CLAIRE AI layer is presented as a platform-wide capability for automating mapping and metadata work. Salesforce completed its acquisition of Informatica on 18 November 2025, and the company now markets itself as "Informatica from Salesforce".

Licensing is consumption-based on Informatica Processing Units (IPUs): customers buy a pool of IPUs that can be spent on any eligible cloud service, with consumption measured per service "scaler", including Secure Agent, CDI-elastic and mass-ingestion volume. This gives flexibility across a broad suite but makes the cost of a single pipeline harder to estimate in advance; Informatica publishes no IPU prices and directs buyers to a quote form. A free Cloud Data Integration offer exists for evaluation. The suite's breadth suits organisations that need ETL alongside master data and governance, but it is heavier to adopt than single-purpose ELT tools.

Qlik Talend Cloud combines Talend's data integration and quality tooling, which Qlik acquired, with Qlik's own change-data-capture replication technology. Qlik describes it as one platform for ELT, ETL and streaming ingest, with real-time movement from databases, SAP, mainframe and SaaS sources, no-code pipelines, automatically generated star-schema data marts, data products and a marketplace, and lineage, quality and a metadata catalogue. Recent releases add agentic data engineering, in which AI agents propose and monitor pipelines subject to human approval.

The product is sold in four packages, Starter, Standard, Premium and Enterprise, and is also available as client-managed software for organisations that cannot use a cloud service. Pricing is not published; Qlik's FAQ says usage is measured on a combination of data volume moved, number of job executions and execution duration. The CDC heritage makes it strong for operational databases and SAP, while the Talend side brings data quality and governance. The trade-off is that buyers must request quotes for every tier and may find overlapping legacy Talend and Qlik product names during evaluation.

Matillion was founded in 2011 by Matthew Scullion and Ed Thompson in Manchester, England, and now operates dual headquarters in Denver and Manchester. Its platform is a visual pipeline designer that pushes transformation work down into the customer's cloud data platform rather than running a separate processing engine. Matillion names Cisco, DocuSign, St. James's Place, Slack and TUI among its customers. The company also offers Maia, an AI agent for building pipelines, which can be trialled on a time-bound, fair-use basis.

Matillion sells three plans, Developer for individuals, Teams for growing businesses and Scale for large organisations, and charges in Matillion Credits. Credits are consumed by task hours, which are billed only while a pipeline runs (validation and sampling are not charged), and by developer users beyond the number included in a plan; fixed annual packages with included credits are also available. No credit rate or plan price is published, so cost comparisons need a sales conversation. The pushdown design keeps data inside the warehouse, but it also means performance and compute cost depend on the warehouse that executes the generated SQL.

Airbyte is an open-source data movement platform founded by Michel Tricot and Jean Lafleur, who joined Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch and shipped a first version in September 2020. The company reports more than 700 replication connectors, about 27,000 community members, more than 1,300 open-source contributors, more than 20,000 GitHub stars and US$181 million in funding. Its self-hosted edition, Airbyte Core, is free to use and modify under the Elastic License 2.0, with the customer responsible for running and maintaining it.

Managed cloud plans add hosting, upgrades and support. Standard starts at US$20 per month with five credits included (about 1 GB of syncs), and Plus starts at US$189 per month for 40 credits, rising through published credit packages to US$4,999 for 2,000 credits; Pro and Enterprise Flex use capacity-based pricing on dedicated compute units called Data Workers. The connector development kit lets teams build connectors for niche APIs, which is the main reason engineering-led organisations choose it. The trade-off is that community-maintained connectors vary in maturity, and self-hosting shifts upgrade, scaling and monitoring work onto the customer.

AWS Glue is Amazon Web Services' serverless data integration service. It runs Apache Spark jobs without infrastructure for the customer to manage, scales workers automatically, and stores table definitions, schemas and job definitions in the Glue Data Catalog, which crawlers populate by scanning data stores. Glue Studio provides a drag-and-drop editor that generates Python or Scala Spark code, and Glue DataBrew offers more than 250 built-in no-code transformations for data preparation. Built-in Data Quality recommends rules and raises alerts, and zero-ETL integrations replicate source changes into Amazon Redshift or a SageMaker lakehouse within minutes.

Pricing is published: ETL jobs and crawlers cost US$0.44 per DPU-hour, billed by the second, and the first million Data Catalog objects stored and first million accesses each month are free. Flex jobs can cut costs for non-urgent workloads by up to 35%. Glue is the natural choice for AWS-centric teams, but its connector catalogue for SaaS applications is narrower than specialist ELT tools, and building jobs still requires Spark knowledge for anything beyond the visual editor. AWS notes that Glue for Ray stops accepting new customers on 30 April 2026.

Azure Data Factory (ADF) is Microsoft's managed cloud service for hybrid ETL, ELT and data integration. Pipelines group activities for data movement, transformation and control flow; linked services hold connection details; and integration runtimes provide the compute that bridges activities and data stores, including self-hosted runtimes for on-premises sources. Mapping data flows let engineers build transformation graphs that run on Spark clusters that ADF starts and stops on demand, and external activities can run transformations on Azure Databricks, HDInsight or SQL. Pipelines support CI/CD through Azure DevOps and GitHub, and monitoring through Azure Monitor.

Microsoft now describes Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric as the next generation of ADF and offers an upgrade path for existing workloads, which buyers should weigh when starting new projects. ADF billing is consumption-based: orchestration is charged per activity run, trigger execution and debug run, data movement per Data Integration Unit (DIU) hour, and data flows per vCore-hour, with a minimum data-flow cluster of eight vCores, prorated by the minute. The pricing page renders rates dynamically by region, so exact figures should be read from the Azure calculator.

dbt is not an extraction tool: it handles the transformation step of ELT by compiling SQL (and Python) models into queries that run inside the warehouse, with version control, testing, documentation and lineage. It is included here because most modern ELT stacks pair an ingestion tool with dbt. dbt Labs merged with Fivetran in an all-stock deal completed on 1 June 2026, and the dbt Fusion engine runtime was open-sourced as dbt Core v2.0 (alpha) under the Apache 2.0 licence.

The managed product has four tiers. Developer is free for one seat with 3,000 models built per month and includes the browser IDE, job scheduling and CI checks but no API access; Starter costs US$100 per user per month for up to five seats, 15,000 models built and 5,000 semantic-layer metric queries; Enterprise and Enterprise+ are custom-priced with 100,000 models built and 30 or unlimited projects. A 14-day trial includes all features. The main limitation for buyers comparing ETL tools is scope: dbt needs a separate ingestion product and a warehouse, and per-seat pricing grows with team size.

Hevo Data offers a no-code platform for building ELT pipelines from databases, SaaS applications and files into cloud warehouses, aimed at teams that want managed ingestion without writing connectors. Its pricing is based on events, which Hevo defines as each record inserted, updated or deleted in the destination. Two self-serve plans are published: Starter at US$299 per month, or US$265 per month billed annually, with volume options of 5, 20 or 50 million events, and Professional at US$849 per month, or US$750 billed annually, with 20, 50 or 100 million events. Enterprise is a custom-priced fixed plan with unlimited data volume per pipeline.

Usage beyond a plan's quota is billed on demand, and some add-ons are excluded from the lower plans. A 14-day trial without a credit card is available. Hevo's event-based tiers are easier to budget than row-based models with variable rates, but the step from Starter to Professional is significant, and teams with heavy update traffic should model how many destination writes their sources generate, since every update counts as an event.

Estuary (product name Estuary Flow) is a data movement platform built around real-time change data capture, which also supports batch sources and in-flight transformations. Its pricing is among the most transparent in the category. The Developer tier is free for up to 10 GB per month and two connector instances, with no credit card. The Cloud tier is pay-as-you-go at US$0.50 per GB plus US$100 per month per connector instance for the first six and US$50 per instance thereafter, prorated by the hour; data is counted each time it is captured from a source and each time it is delivered to a destination, including transformation output.

Enterprise contracts add annual discounts, private and bring-your-own-cloud deployment, single sign-on, a SOC 2 report and a HIPAA business associate agreement. Exceeding Developer limits starts a 30-day free trial of the Cloud tier automatically. Estuary is a younger and smaller vendor than Fivetran or Informatica, so its connector catalogue and partner ecosystem are narrower, and the double counting of captured and delivered data should be included when comparing per-GB prices with row-based competitors.

Integrate.io is a low-code data pipeline platform that says it has served data teams for more than a decade. The company describes itself as privately owned, cash-flow positive and not dependent on venture funding, with a remote-first team and customers ranging from start-ups to Fortune 100 enterprises.

Its pricing approach differs from most of the category. The single published plan, Integrate.io Core, costs US$1,999 per month and includes unlimited data volumes, unlimited pipelines and unlimited connectors; the company's FAQ states that the cost stays the same whether a customer moves 2 million or 200 million rows. Add-ons such as advanced security and compliance, team role-based access control and HIPAA readiness are configured in a plan builder without listed prices. A 14-day trial with full feature access and no credit card is offered. The flat fee benefits high-volume users but is expensive for small teams moving modest data, for whom free tiers from Fivetran, Airbyte or Estuary cost far less.

Stitch is a lightweight cloud ELT service that replicates data from SaaS applications and databases into a warehouse. It is a Talend product, and Talend is now part of Qlik; the Stitch site is branded "Stitch – A Qlik product" and its copyright notice names Talend, Inc..

Prices are published for US customers. Standard starts at US$100 per month with row options from 5 million to 300 million rows per month, billed monthly or annually; Advanced costs US$1,500 per month billed annually with 100 million rows and three destinations; Premium costs US$3,000 per month billed annually with 1 billion rows and five destinations; a Platform plan for agencies is quote-based. A 14-day trial includes all integrations and unlimited rows. International customers must contact sales for pricing. Stitch remains useful for simple replication, but development attention within Qlik has shifted to Qlik Talend Cloud, and transformation features are minimal compared with the larger platforms.

Rivery is a SaaS ELT platform that combines source connectors, SQL and Python transformations and workflow orchestration. It is now part of Boomi: its pricing page uses the term "Boomi Data Unit" (BDU) for credits, which it says are also known as Rivery Pricing Unit (RPU) credits, and links to Boomi-hosted documentation and community forums.

The Base plan is described as an introductory pay-as-you-go edition at US$0.90 per BDU credit, billed monthly, limited to two users and one environment. Professional, Pro Plus and Enterprise plans add users, environments, larger replication volumes and security controls, with prices on request. The trial gives access to Professional features for 14 days or 1,000 credits, valued by Rivery at US$1,200, whichever is used first. Rivery's combination of ingestion and orchestration reduces the number of tools a small team needs, but the credit model requires tracking consumption, and its long-term product direction now depends on Boomi's integration roadmap.