7 Best ETL Automation Tools for Data Analysts in 2024

What is ETL automation?

We’ve already established the ETL as the most critical and time-consuming part of data warehousing. One way businesses have been able to shorten the ETL intervals is through the use of ETL automation.

Automated ETL is a data integration process that performs extract, transformation, and load tasks without manual intervention. As data sources become more diverse, it becomes difficult for teams to manage ETL at scale. A solution is to use ETL automation tools that automate data integration tasks out of the box.

Data analysts and IT teams already use business intelligence ETL tools or data integration software to automatically generate ETL code and accelerate ETL processes. But as the volume and velocity of data flow increase, teams are finding that existing ETL tools are unable to deliver.

The answer lies in real-time data warehousing solutions that have the flexibility and horsepower to execute successful BI projects and high-volume data acquisition.

ETL automation tools are popular for several reasons:

• Simple point-and-click interface
• No manual coding
• Quick data transformations

Apart from providing a visual overview of data processing architecture, ETL automation tools have built-in connectors for the most popular data sources, combined with advanced data validation and cleaning capabilities.

7 top ETL automation tools

Whatagraph

Whatagraph is an automated data pipeline that helps enterprises load data from multiple marketing data sources to Google BigQuery.

Whatagraph’s data transfer service doesn’t require any coding and effectively removes manual work. Using our platform, you can complete the data transfer in just 3 steps:

1. Connect the destination
2. Choose the integration
3. Set the schema
4. Schedule the transfer

In the last stage, you can also set the transfer frequency — when and how often you want your data to move to BigQuery.

Key features:

• Move data from a source to BigQuery in just 4 steps
• No coding or developers required
• Transparent and easy-to-understand pricing plan
• No maintenance and infinite scalability
• Data visualization via drag-and-drop dashboards.

Whatagraph is a tool that scales up or down depending on your business needs.

You might base your marketing strategy on insights from their LinkedIn Ads or Google Ads campaigns and be happy with it for the time being.

However, when you want to add more channels, like TikTok Ads or Instagram, Whatagraph scales up to deliver.

Whatagraph pricing:

Whatagraphs offers three pricing plans based on the number of users and the number of data sources you want to connect. Data transfers to BigQuery are available as a flexibly priced add-on to each of the pricing plans or as a standalone feature.

Who is Whatagraph for:

Marketing agencies and in-house teams looking to extract data from multiple digital marketing platforms to store it in BigQuery and create compelling marketing reports using that data.

If you’re looking for an easy-to-use solution to connect data from various marketing sources, keep your marketing data safe, or want to visualize your BigQuery data, book a demo call and find out how Whatagraph can help.

Qlik Compose

Previously known as Attunity Compose, Qlik Compose gives data architect teams functionalities to design, build and operate enterprise data warehouses without manual coding.

Key features:

• Lunch new warehouses and data marts, both on-premise and in the cloud
• Update production data warehouse models and add new data sources as your business grows
• Run ETL jobs on schedule, or on-demand
• Monitor ETL jobs in real-time

Qlik helps teams deliver business intelligence faster with fewer resources and at less cost. Data architects and developers can create data testing models using Qlik Compose design studio. It also allows them to import industry-standard models like Inmon, Kimball, and Data Vault.

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Qlik pricing

• Qlik Sense Business —$30/user/month.
• Qlik Sense Enterprise SaaS — $70 per month.

Who is Qlik for:

• Data architects, developers who need to create an agile data warehouse, and non-tech teams who want to ingest data from multiple sources for analysis.

Fivetran

Fivetran is a cloud-based ETL tool that allows users to automate ETL testing, explore metadata, and replicate their business data in the data warehouse.

Built for analysts who need to access their business data, Fivetran supports data integration with the most popular data warehouses.

Key features:

• Robust, automated data pipeline with standardized schemas
• Logging and reporting capabilities
• Supports cloud-based data warehouses like BigQuery, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Redshift.
• Scalable cloud resources on demand
  

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One of the biggest perks of Fivetran is that it supports a rich array of SaaS data sources while you can also add your own custom integrations.

Fivetran pricing

• Fivetran Starter — $120 per month
• Fivetran Standard Select — $60 per month
• Fivetran Standard — $180 per month
• Fivetran Standard Select — $240 per month

Who is Fivetran for:

• Fast-growing software companies who are looking to connect external SaaS services to extract and load data into internal data lakes and warehouses for data science and analytics purposes.

ActiveBatch

ActiveBatch contains the data warehouse and ETL automation functionalities that help users optimize their ETL processes for real-time data warehousing.

ActiveBatch features an integrated Jobs Library that allows you to build and automate robust end-to-end workflows in less than half the time. The library contains a range of pre-build platform-neutral connectors that allow teams to streamline data warehousing and ETL processes without scripting.

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Key features:

• Virtual integration through ActiveBatch Service Library
• Full API accessibility and ETL test automation
• Advanced granular date/time scheduling
• Adding multiple checkpoints to restart the data warehousing process
• Granular permission to prevent unauthorized access
• Auditing and governance features to streamline business rules across the enterprise

ActiveBatch ETL automation allows you to create reliable data migration workflows across various heterogeneous systems and different test cases. Like Informatica, it features a drag-and-drop workload designer and event-driven architecture.

ActiveBatch pricing

Quote-based pricing plans are available for:

• ActiveBatch Core Licensing
• ActiveBatch Web Console
• ActiveBatch Self-Service Portal
• ActiveBatch Mobile Ops

Who is ActiveBatch for:

SMEs who are looking to implement scheduling and profiling to business-critical systems and make CRM, ERP, Big Data, BI, ETL tools, work order management, project management, and consulting systems work together seamlessly with minimal human intervention.

Stitch Data Loader

Stitch Data Loader is a simple yet capable open-source ETL engine for businesses of all sizes that need to regularly move records from multiple SaaS applications and databases into data warehouses and data lakes for analysis and insights.

Since Talend acquired it, Stitch has been part of the Talend Data Fabric and operates as an independent business unit.

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Key features:

• Transparent data pipeline and regression testing process
• Supports multiple data sources
• DevOps for continuous testing
• Secure data analytics and governance through a centralized data infrastructure

Stitch is well-liked among teams for its open-source architecture and ease of onboarding. It’s a good plug-and-play platform for businesses looking to scale up analytics in their organization.

On the downside, since Talend acquired it, any developments and upgrades to data quality testing seem to have been halted.

Stitch Data Loader pricing:

• Standard Plan — $100/month up based on volume above 5M rows/month
• Flexible Plan — quote-based full access to 100+ data sources, online support, 5 users per account

Who is Stitch Data Loader for:

Businesses of all sizes that need to move billions of records from various sources to data stores, data warehouses, and data lakes.

StreamSets

StreamSets DataOps is an ETL testing automation tool that helps teams deliver continuous test coverage and handle data drift using a modern approach to data engineering and interaction. It empowers business analytics with speed, flexibility, resilience, and reliability.

Key features:

• Move source data easily between on-premise and multiple cloud environments without rework.
• Visual full-lifecycle tools enable more data workers to build pipelines
• A single view across all data operations both on-premises and in the cloud
• Eliminates the complexity of modern data
• Robust alerting and notification capabilities

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StreamSets enables powerful data transformations, while native integration with Oracle and Snowflake allows data engineers to move beyond SQL to harness powerful data transformation logic using an intuitive design canvas.

StreamSets pricing:

StreamSets Profesional — $1000 per month

StreamSets Enterprise — quote-based annual plan

Who is StreamSets for:

StreamSets is for enterprises that need a single SaaS platform to design, deploy, monitor, and manage smart data pipelines on any cloud and on-premises with high scalability.

Talend

Talend is an open-source integration application that helps teams automate ETL testing to meet their business requirements. It offers functionality to build basic data pipelines. Talend Cloud also features a simple user interface like Open Studio that provides ETL testing tools for collaboration, monitoring, scheduling, etc.

Key features:

• Extract data from designated sources like relational databases, JSON, XML, and flat files.
• Monitor ETL process data via reports and visualizations such as charts and graphs.
• Supports event or transaction-based integrations that react to changes in real-time
• The multi-tenant architecture enables multiple users to perform software testing

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Talend Open Studio offers file management without scripting and enables data flow orchestration to keep data management as efficient as possible. Businesses can extract data from diverse datasets, as well as transform and normalize data into a unified format.

Talend pricing:

• Talend Cloud Data Integration — $1,170 per user
• Talend Pipeline Designer — usage-based hourly pricing
• Talend Data Fabrics — quote-based pricing

Who is Talend for:

Businesses looking to extract data from diverse datasets and normalize it in a consistent format for reporting.

Verdict

ETL automation tools remove the need to repetitive design, development, and operational tasks in data warehousing. They allow non-tech teams to proceed faster with data integration and tackle big data coming from diverse sources.

These seven tools are all engineered and refined to be the best in what they do, as their functionalities meet different business needs.

When designing Whatagraph, we had two customer types on mind:

• Marketing agencies that handle multiple channels for hundreds of clients
• Non-tech in-house marketing teams

We developed a data integration and reporting tool that simplifies moving large amounts of data to BigQuery to the point-and-click level.