Why Elglide
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 support views at all.
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 95% lower cost
Transparent pricing — you pay for rows synced, shown live in-app, not an opaque Monthly-Active-Rows meter. At 5M changed rows a month that is $120 on Elglide against about $2,500 at Fivetran's published Standard rate — 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 supported. |
| 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 — including deletion capture, with recommended promotion and demotion for both tables and views. | ✗Not offered. Competitors that offer it (e.g. Hevo Data, Boomi) ignore deletions. |
| Delete detection | ✓Every sync mode catches deletes — watermark and RowHash included, no log access required. | ✗CDC-enabled connectors only. 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. | ✗No equivalent — incremental sync depends on database log access. |
| Very large tables (1B+ rows) | ✓Parallel split loads handle the initial snapshot and every incremental at any scale — billions of rows per table. | Initial syncs degrade past roughly a billion rows per table and can stall or fail. Views aren’t an option as a workaround. |
| Destination & data trust | ||
| Clean destination schema | ✓Your columns, nothing else. No vendor bookkeeping columns in your warehouse. |
✗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 95% 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. |
Comparison based on publicly available competitor documentation and pricing as of September 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.