Elglide vs. Fivetran
Elglide and competitors like Fivetran all move data from your operational databases into your warehouse. The difference is everything around that: what counts as a source, how the sync plan is chosen, how long your data lives outside your network, and what the bill looks like at the end of the month.
Views are first-class
Sync database views — full or incremental — exactly like tables. Fivetran doesn’t sync database views.
Your data stays yours
In SaaS mode, each batch is deleted from our server the moment its upload to your Snowflake ends. In Hybrid mode, your rows never pass through Elglide’s cloud — we see metadata only.
Up to 85% lower cost
Transparent pricing — you pay for rows synced, shown live in-app, not an opaque Monthly-Active-Rows meter. At 2M changed rows a month that is $49 on Elglide against more than $424 on Fivetran's Standard plan — see the worked example.
Elglide vs. Fivetran
| Features | Elglide | Fivetran |
|---|---|---|
| Sync engine | ||
| Database views as sources | ✓First-class. Full and incremental sync for views, powered by RowHash. | ✗Not synced. Fivetran’s documentation: “No, Fivetran doesn’t sync views from the source database to the destination.” |
| Sync mechanism selection | ✓Detected at runtime. The engine picks the plan per run — Full, Watermark, RowHash, or log-based CDC — and keeps refining it from run history and your data, recommending each promotion or demotion for you to confirm with one click. Incremental by default; nothing to configure. | One replication method for the whole connection. With Change Tracking or CDC, every table without them shows up disabled and doesn’t sync. |
| Change tracking turned off at the source | ✓Keeps syncing. The table reloads once, carries on with RowHash with nothing to set up, and goes back to CDC as soon as it’s turned on again. | Skips the table until tracking is turned back on. |
| Watermark incremental sync | ✓Yes — with recommended promotion and demotion for both tables and views. Watermark tracks soft deletes; a per-run count audit steps the table back to RowHash automatically if physical deletes ever appear, so they are never silently missed. | ✗Not offered. Competitors that offer it (e.g. Hevo Data, Boomi) ignore deletions. |
| Delete detection | ✓RowHash catches physical deletes with no log access and no source-side setup — a row missing from this run’s read is deleted in Snowflake on the same merge. Native CT/CDC catches them at the source. | Log-based methods catch them. Without log access, Teleport Sync catches them only within its size limits (see below); PostgreSQL’s query-based sync only with Capture Deletes turned on. Airbyte and Hevo Data have the same gap — deletes are only caught in CDC/log-based mode, not standard incremental sync. Stitch can't detect hard deletes at all without log-based replication. |
| Delta sync without touching the source | ✓Flagship RowHash computes reliable incremental/delta syncs from source metadata and data distribution — no log access, no schema changes, and it works on views. | Teleport Sync needs only a read-only login, but stops at 400 tables and 20M rows per table on MySQL, and 15M rows per table on Oracle. Being retired on PostgreSQL. No views. |
| Files | ||
| Files on your own file servers (Windows or NAS shares) |
✓Ready-made Network
Share connector. Type \\server\share and an account
in the portal; the agent inside your network reads the files in
place — no mount, no staging copy. No plan tier required.
|
Local File System connector in Private Preview, on Hybrid Deployment only (Enterprise or Business Critical plans). A Windows share must first be mounted on the agent host. |
| File format per table | ✓Format, delimiter and options are set per file set, so one connection can feed a CSV table, a tab-delimited TXT table and an Excel table side by side. | On its S3 connector, file type and delimiter are set once for the whole connection. |
| Destination & data trust | ||
| Clean destination schema |
✓Your columns, nothing
else, by default. No vendor bookkeeping columns in your warehouse.
Soft delete with tracking columns is a per-pipeline
option for database sources.
File-sourced tables add four lineage
columns (_ELGLIDE_FILE, …) so every row
traces back to its file.
|
✗Reserved system columns
added to every table
(_fivetran_deleted, _fivetran_synced, …).
In soft delete mode, the default for most
connectors, rows deleted at the source stay in your tables,
flagged _fivetran_deleted = TRUE.
|
| Rename a destination schema or table | ✓Any time — it’s a setting. The next run loads everything into the new table. | ✗Not possible. Fivetran’s documentation: you can’t rename a schema in your destination, or change its tables. |
| Customer data retention in vendor cloud | ✓SaaS mode: each batch is deleted from our server the moment its upload to your Snowflake ends, whether it worked or not. Hybrid mode: your rows never pass through Elglide’s cloud — metadata only. | Kept in Fivetran’s cloud storage, usually under 8 hours, and up to 30 days if loading into your warehouse is delayed. Fivetran privacy documentation. |
| Operations & governance | ||
| Hybrid agent and 1-minute syncs | ✓On every account, at the same published rate. | Hybrid Deployment needs an Enterprise or Business Critical plan; 1-minute syncs need Enterprise. Those plans’ prices aren’t published. Standard syncs every 15 minutes. |
| Scheduling granularity | ✓Database-level by default, customizable per table or per view. | One schedule per connector. |
| Custom audit rules | ✓Built in. A row count after every database sync, plus rules of your own — distinct counts, nulls, sums, custom SQL — checked against the source. On a mismatch it retries, then tells you. | ✗Not built in. |
| No-code experience | ✓Drag-and-drop pipeline canvas — managers and business users without a technical background wire up pipelines with a few clicks. | Form-based configuration aimed at data engineers. |
| Cost | ||
| Pricing model | ✓Transparent rows-synced pricing — you see every billed row. Up to 85% lower cost than Fivetran's published rate (worked example). | Monthly Active Rows (MAR) — the bill scales with data churn and is hard to forecast; volume discounts unpublished. Since March 2025, price tiers apply to each connection on its own — Fivetran says users with many equal-sized connections see higher prices. A connection between 1 and 1M MAR pays a $5 base charge, and deleted rows count toward MAR. |
Comparison based on publicly available competitor documentation and pricing as of October 2026; capabilities may have changed since. Fivetran, Airbyte, Hevo Data, Stitch, and Boomi are trademarks of their respective owners and are not affiliated with Elglide.