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 syncs the tables behind a view and leaves you to rebuild the view yourself.
Your data stays yours
In SaaS mode, staged data lives as compressed Parquet for seconds — purged, guaranteed. In Hybrid mode, zero customer data ever touches the Elglide cloud.
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 $30 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: it syncs the tables a view references, and you re-create the view in 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. | Fixed at connector setup. Changing the sync mode means reconfiguring — and often a full re-sync. |
| 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, no table-size cap, 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 tables under 100 GB on Oracle. Retired on PostgreSQL. No views. |
| Very large tables (1B+ rows) | ✓Parallel split loads handle the initial snapshot and every incremental at any scale — billions of rows per table. | Past Teleport Sync’s limits, a large table needs log-based capture enabled on the source. Views aren’t an option as a workaround. |
| 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. No vendor bookkeeping columns in your warehouse.
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, …).
|
| Customer data retention in vendor cloud | ✓SaaS mode: staged as compressed Parquet for seconds — under a minute — then purged, in guaranteed mode. Hybrid deployment mode: zero customer data held. | Data is buffered in the vendor’s cloud for hours to days — typical of Fivetran and other competitors. |
| Operations & governance | ||
| Scheduling granularity | ✓Database-level by default, customizable per table or per view. | One schedule per connector. |
| Audit & SOX compliance | ✓Built-in audits before, during, and after every pipeline run, plus customizable audits — designed to meet SOX requirements and support SOX audits. | Post-hoc sync logs. |
| 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 2026, a connection under 1M MAR pays a $5 minimum, 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.