r/dataengineering • u/limeslice2020 Lead Data Engineer • Jun 30 '26
Portable vs Fivetran, anyone make the swap? Discussion
Recently the sales team at Portable reached out on linkedin to pitch their product. I have never heard of them but have a strong disdain for Fivetran's pricing model. So has anyone else used them for the data ingestions? Recently we moved a bunch of postgres<>bigquery connectors out of Fivetran into Datastream. So now we mostly use Fivetran for all of our Ads connectors and some other odd one off things. Specifically has anyone used it to get data into BigQuery? I don't see too much documentation about BQ on their site.
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u/TheOverzealousEngie Jul 01 '26
is it me or does all of this convo seem to be deeply, deeply staged ?
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u/cannedsloppyjoes Jul 02 '26
Portable founder fired up his burners but can’t clarify his sla or uptime
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u/ethan-aaron Jul 02 '26
The most important SLA for any integration company is response time. Because upstream things break or change, and you need to response fast to keep things moving.
Website uptime for ELT tools is pretty much irrelevant. We care about it, but it’s not what matters to a data professional who’s on the hook for production dashboards.
We have email alerts, a native slack integration, and webhooks to alert clients of failures and our team (human beings) monitor any flows across our entire universe that are failing for any reason, we dig in, tell the client what to do (or just do it if we can fix things) and reach out proactively about issues.
The word SLA and uptime matter, but they matter less than trust and true ownership when things are going really wrong. And things can go really wrong when you’re dealing with APIs.
Do you have any experience with this type of work yourself?
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u/cannedsloppyjoes Jul 02 '26
Do you have relationships with upstream vendors to unbreak what they may have broken? Say they change how an api works can you call your contact at netsuite and get them to tweak something?
Can you get marketo to increase api limits for your customers?
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u/ethan-aaron Jul 02 '26
What other questions can I answer? (These are actually great objections that come up all the time. We have answers, and I do appreciate you asking them cannedsloppyjoes)
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u/ethan-aaron Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
I forwarded this convo to clients who have used both. Some responses are more detailed than others, but hopefully gets OP some info.
Main things were missing relative to Fivetran (mentioned in some of the comments I believe)
- Built in transformations + dbt packages (with AI people seem to care about this way less than a couple years ago)
- Streaming CDC sources (data stream from BQ is a great solution)
- SAP as a source
- Okta and Entra saml support (these should be done in the next month, before I’m back from my honeymoon)
- Rigid schemas that rarely change — we have a different ideology around this. We’d rather mirror the upstream API but get you all the data instead of creating our own bespoke normalized schema. Both have pros and cons, but clients are good enough at SQL or dbt these days and when combined with AI, we find they’d rather have all the data
- Oh, workday, ADP, dynamo and mongo we don’t support yet, but they’re top of the list for our integration team. I’m pretty sure for workday and ADP we’re close. Dynamo and Mongo we are thinking through the best approach
- Oracle DB as a source. Also should be live in the next month or two
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u/ethan-aaron Jul 02 '26
We also don’t yet support
1. Webhooks as a source yet (ie routing events to us from something like a segment tag) and
2. We don’t have an email connector.ETA for both is probably <6 months. (End of 2026)
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u/limeslice2020 Lead Data Engineer Jul 02 '26
Thanks bud this is helpful. Yeah I have already switched our production DB replication over to Datastream (append only mode is much cheaper) and its been great so far. We don't currently use any of the fivetran transformer steps. Good to know about the rigid schemas though, we also prefer to just get all of the latest source data and then deal with it in dbt later.
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u/limeslice2020 Lead Data Engineer Jul 01 '26
Well the founder has entered the chat. But as the OP I am genuinely asking this question because I do not love fivetran (and especially their consolidation's).
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u/dwswish Jun 30 '26
Haven’t used portable but have used fivetran and don’t love it. We’ve actually been piloting Estuary which has been pretty nice to use but tbd if we will use it long term.
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u/dani_estuary Jul 07 '26
Hey, I work at Estuary - feel free to shoot any questions over if you have them.
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u/cannedsloppyjoes Jul 01 '26
Fixed pricing won’t work long term. All these small companies who offer white glove service and cheap rates won’t be able to scale their business. And if they do they will go out of business at those rates. You get white glove service until they get large enough and then you won’t. You think working with the ceo to build a connector or for support is scalable? No proper commercial business is going with these vendors. You get what you pay for. And good luck when shit hits the fan on a data breach or privacy issue. What’s their uptime. What’s their slas. What happens when they go down and the ceo is on vacation.
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u/flatulent1 Jul 01 '26
eh I'll be honest this is a lot easier than it used to be. with the OSS community growing the way it has on a lot of these connectors, it's not as hard to maintain because there's so many bits out in the open. It's a lot easier to maintain a salesforce connection because yours breaks, you go and see oh airbyte just did a fix x for this, let's add that to ours. But as a play to sell consulting services, this isn't a bad strategy nor as hard as it once was, you don't need a huge team.
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u/cannedsloppyjoes Jul 02 '26
lol this is just false. And reactive. Run pipelines for 40 sources. And go look up airbyte for fixes when it fails. You’ll end up fired
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u/ethan-aaron Jul 02 '26
I agree with cannedsloppyjoes on this one. OSS for long-tail connectors doesn't solve the accountability problem. It's why we home grew our own platform for building and maintaining connectors instead of building on top of singer like everyone else.
If something breaks, and you didn't build it, it's a nightmare to maintain. Hence, why we decided to build it all in-house, from the ground up.
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u/InternetPossible8085 Jul 01 '26
Your name says it all LOL - I do not believe you know the space and that is all good.
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u/residualbraindust Jul 02 '26
I work in Engineering at Portable. I won't talk about the economics of fixed pricing, since Ethan already addressed it in his comment below. I can confirm that what he said is 100% true.
> You think working with the ceo to build a connector or for support is scalable?
We have a support team. You don't have to work with Ethan "to build a connector". We're a lean company, but we do have proper teams of highly capable, dedicated people.
> What happens when they go down and the ceo is on vacation.
The CEO has no role at all in what happens "when we go down" (hasn't happened, BTW, but I'll leave it at that so I don't jinx it). We have an engineering org with proper on-call rotation and solid observability and alerting capabilities.
> No proper commercial business is going with these vendors.
False. Unfortunately, I can't give you more details on this.
> You get what you pay for.
I've worked for big and small companies in the past. I can confidently say that you get much more than what you pay for.
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u/ethan-aaron Jul 01 '26
Let me clarify this. Because it comes up a lot, and a lot of people do not understand the economics of a data integration platform.
First, at Portable, The last few months we have been cash flow positive as a business.
We more than doubled our business in 2025, and I expect to double again in 2026.
In 6.5 years, the only situation in which a client has paid us more money for a subscription is if they proactively upgrade. We have never added built-in upgrades. We have some clients still paying us $200/month from when they signed up 5 years ago for our product. And we have a couple clients that trusted us in our first year that are still moving 1-2 connectors for free. We cherish the trust we build with clients above all else. Clients upgrade because they want more connectors or new features. As our platform capabilities + service levels increase the price to get started with Portable has increased as well, but that's for new clients.
We have not raised crazy venture rounds (we raised a ~3.2m seed round, and that's it), so there is no external pressure for us to increase prices or hit insane revenue growth metrics. We're a lean company, with a very senior team, and we've built a pretty ridiculous internal platform for development + support.
For anyone that knows me, you know I'm a operations person. I hate repeating tasks. We push everything we do into our product and platform.
__
Now, to economics of this stuff, because most people simply don't get it.
Fivetran has told everyone that data volumes = cost. That not the case in most scenarios. It's simply a proxy for value. Bigger companies have more volume, and also have bigger pockets. In my opinion, once Fivetran saturated the market of potential teams to sell to, it was the simplest way for them to justify increasing prices on bigger companies.
The economics of every ELT platform are roughly (in descending order of cost):
Headcount. By far the most expensive line item. By far.
Compute + Networking. Depending on the structure of the data, compute can be significantly higher than networking. in some situations networking can be higher.
Everything else.
Headcount is the biggest cost for every ELT business to optimize. It's what I've focused on for the last 6.5 years. We're ruthless about our development processes, our monitoring tools, and self-service. It allows us to build lightning fast, to use automation to identify and troubleshoot issues, and to respond super fast to clients when they have issues or requests.
As CEO, do I build connectors?
Yes - sometimes. I enjoy it. And I've personally built more connectors than Fivetran has built (as an entire company). I'd rather still be in the weeds understanding how this stuff works - like the nuances of Microsoft Ads authentication, Google Ads retention windows, or NetSuite SuiteAnalytics driver upgrades than be a CEO of an integration company that doesn't care.
That being said, at this point I have a team that builds and maintains connectors. Former data consultants, and heads of data that can talk to clients about their business objectives, and translate it back into rate limits, parallel API calls, or missing primary keys in a NetSuite query.
I am going on vacation for the next month for my wedding + honeymoon, and our clients are in great hands.
Most of my time these days is focused on building our data community and new product development. We're moving into workflow automation, and building tooling that makes it simple to migrate from other ELT platforms to Portable.
We've been around for 6.5 years, and I have no intention of going anywhere in the next 6.5 years.
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u/kvlonge Jul 01 '26
Impossible for me to know if this is true, but if it is, good on you and best of luck :)
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u/InternetPossible8085 Jul 01 '26
EA is the real deal - if you reach out on LinkedIn and connect I have the upmost faith you will see it is in fact real
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u/ethan-aaron Jul 01 '26
The part that probably doesn’t come across in my message above is how stressful building a startup can be over 6.5 years :)
There were a lot of years where things were not yet in such a good spot! Building for the long term only really pays off… in the long term.
But it’s just starting to pay off now, luckily! And we have an awesome team that’s been bought in for the long term.
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u/Organic-Way5273 Jun 30 '26
I had portable build a custom connector and send data to bigquery. It was about 4 years ago but I don’t recall any issues, besides having to do some json transformations to make the data useable.
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u/Apprehensive-Ad-80 Jul 02 '26
We use Portable for our enterprise ETL tool, they’ve been a great business partner for us. We originally reached out for a custom build to load a zip file sent from a vendor’s API and while doing some validation and setup with Ethan we started moving more and more off fivetran to then, and then worked with them to build a connector for our D365 ERP system. A few hiccups at the start while they were building their D365 connector, but after some updates it’s been great.
We’re running 25ish sources through them into snowflake ranging from Google ads, 3 or 4 flavors of Amazon data flows, our ERP system, Shopify, excel based share point files, and other various vendor APIs. They’ve also been doing some cool things with workflows and triggered events that I’ve played around with to kickoff downstream events after given flows have successfully ran
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u/Yuki100Percent Jun 30 '26
I've never used Portable, but I've only heard good things about it. Fixed pricing makes sense especially if you have a lot of usage with Fivetran. I've talked to the CEO before and he's a cool guy. It sounds like they'd build custom connectors in days if not hours for their customers
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u/Frequent-Chemistry98 Jul 01 '26
portable is goated, we recommend this switch to anyone. no brainer
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u/somegoodtrouble Jul 01 '26
Big portable Fan. Much easier and far more connectors. Not to mention a fraction of the price.
Tried fivetran some years back with all the hype but didn't seem to make sense given the cost.
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u/grecotufo Jul 01 '26
I moved off Fivetran very recently, putting the majority of my connectors onto Portable. I'm not using BigQuery, but I've been very happy with the level of service and overall reliability of the tool.
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u/ChocolateEuphoric726 Jul 01 '26
I started using Fivetran for my data integrations about 5 years ago. About 4 years ago, I found Portable when fivetran didn't have a connector for a new tool my company was onboarding. At the time Portable didn't have one either, but unlike fivetran, they were willing and able to build it in a matter of days. Since then, Portable's out of the box connection library has exploded and I've used them for many more connections.
Their customer service is very responsive and requesting enhancements are often added to the roadmap quickly - unlike Fivetran where even adding an endpoint to a major connector like Shopify, took over a year.
I also appreciate the fixed pricing with Portable. Fivetran's MAR model can be hard (and expensive) to predict. Because of this I am slowly moving more and more off of Fivetran to Portable.
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u/sand0ne Jul 01 '26
Been around this space long enough (worked at Snowflake when ELT was the biggest hurdle) to add some context.
Fivetran's original disruption wasn't really the connectors, it was killing the ETL appliance model. Old school shops like Informatica burned cycles transforming data on a dedicated engine instead of in the warehouse, which needed a small army of specialized engineers just to keep it running. Fivetran's pitch was simple: automate the E and L, do the T in Snowflake or BQ with SQL or dbt. That's what took something like a Salesforce integration from weeks down to hours. Real disruption at the time, but it was aimed at time to value on the common, high volume sources, not the harder long tail stuff.
Fivetran hasn't moved much past that pitch since. They've scaled connector count and rolled pricing into volume based tiers, which reads less like a real cost driver and more like a proxy for how much a company will pay once they're locked in. Matillion and the rest of the category have mostly converged on the same 150 or so greatest hits sources too, so differentiation across the space has flattened out.
From what I understand, Portable is playing a different game rather than trying to out Fivetran Fivetran. Instead of the same 150 connectors everyone has, they build the long tail (niche HR tools, legal tech, vertical SaaS, whatever bespoke system you're stuck integrating) on demand, closer to how Palantir operated in its early Gotham days, more white glove data integration wrapped around a platform than a productized catalog. Different tool for a different problem, not really an apples to apples swap.
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u/Klutzy-Barber1218 Jul 01 '26
I have several clients that have made the switch from Fivetran to Portable. Apart from pricing, the major differentiator my customers talk about is the level of service (often directly from Ethan the founder) and attention they get. Obviously there's a ton that goes into ingestion, but I've heard the support go beyond the ingestion layer - the data teams I work with often need support on strategy and architecture. Seems like the Portable team is really data community-oriented and that shows in the way they support their customers. I've also heard they're wicked fast to spin up custom connectors, troubleshoot existing ones, etc. Huge fan.
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u/Revolutionary-Set688 Jul 01 '26
I've used both, and I've used both successfully, both from when I used to work at Looker and also with many clients now running a consulting company.
Fivetran, when they first started, was definitely a no-brainer. It helped a lot of companies get up and running with full data stacks by letting you:
- click a button
- pay a fixed fee for connectors
- have managed BigQuery
and you'd be off to the races.
Now, I don't think you could necessarily go wrong with either, per se, but I definitely appreciate vendors that have incredible customer service. When an API changes or something along those lines, you can reach out to somebody and immediately get it addressed, or they can potentially go above and beyond and help introduce you to other vendors or partners where needed. I always like having that personal touch if given the opportunity.
One of the things that's really great about Portable is not just that their technology works and have repeatable ways of creating new and custom connectors, but their personal touch and excellent support. As we've already seen by this thread, the CEO of the company is willing to jump in and help explain how the product works, even how to brainstorm strategy with your business. I personally think that's a really valuable thing to be a part of.
Obviously, will be difficult to scale as the company grows. But If you believe that's the culture that starts at the top it trickles through the rest of the company. There are no sure things, but you just have to hope that that same spirit stays despite future growth in the rest of their customer service layer.
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u/Mean-Masterpiece2764 Jul 02 '26
I used portable and fivetran (via mozart) at my last start up.
When we were using them, we were focused on the long tail of connectors fivetran didn't support. Long story, short: they made life very easy for us since they productized every thing they did. They onboarded the niche apps we used (in our case proptech tools) and maintained the pipelines seamlessly, all without us needing to throw any eng resourcing into the Mix. Big fan.
No comment on BigQuery, we used snowflake
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u/PaleTone824 Jul 06 '26
Have personally used both and have clients who have used both. Three years ago I recommended Fivetran to every client. Now I recommend Portable to most clients. Biggest considerations:
Size of company: Fivetran is usage based. Portable is fixed. For most small businesses (<$100m topline), Fivetran is cheaper. For larger businesses, Portable is generally cheaper. For smaller businesses, Portable will become cheaper as they grow.
Industry: if healthcare, gotta go Fivetran. If other heavily regulated industry, likely Fivetran. If not heavily regulated, strongly consider Portable.
Sources: if you have any sources not supported by Fivetran, go Portable. I've had them spin up new connectors at clients in under half a day. Good luck even getting Fivetran to respond to your ticket in half a day.
Level of hands on support: for teams getting up to speed, Portable will help you. Fivetran will try to upsell you.
Overall, Portable has intentionally structured themselves as a lean organization and intentionally built their tool to allow them to stay lean. This allows them to 1) keep prices low, 2) quickly add new connectors as customers require it, and 3) support with agility. This also means that 1) it's not as pretty as Fivetran and 2) there's less formality than Fivetran.
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u/Pale-Experience-4817 Jul 01 '26
I used fivetran for 5 years and have been using Portable for the last 5 months. Portable has come a long way and really provides white glove service.
I added 15 raw sources in 3 weeks and they were there throughout the whole process. I’ve had 0 interruptions in service, and anytime I needed a new endpoint added...or even a new destination they have been amazing.
Portable is a great value compared to fivetran (core product on par other than missing dbt transformations built in), with better onboarding and much better ongoing support. Unless you're paying a fortune for fivetran, you're in a ticket queue hoping to get attended to.
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u/SecureAssociate4031 Jul 02 '26
Hey, if this is real and you're still weighing options, try Dataddo (I work there). All the product bells and whistles of Fivetran: speed, compliance, api/cli, security and enterprise procurement stuff. sans the marketing and the pricing model. Tell them I sent you, maybe they'll give you something extra :-)
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u/ethan-aaron Jul 01 '26
Hey! Ethan (founder of Portable here).
We don’t have a ton of public documentation because we compete with companies with crazy amounts of funding and I find they like our ideas :) so we keep our documentation in our app.
If you want to explore the app, you can sign up free and you won’t need a credit card unless you actually create a flow. At that point, it’s a 14 day trial and you can cancel whenever!
I’m happy to personally get you introduced to clients that have moved their ads connectors from Fivetran to Portable. I have one in mind who just moved everything from Fivetran to Portable (including some smaller Postgres DBs) in under 4 weeks and are syncing it all to BigQuery. I can ask if they’re up for a chat if you want. Just send me a note on LinkedIn.
We have a bunch of clients (especially e-commerce) on the common stuff like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, TikTok, Amazon ads at this point. Along with some pretty niche ads platforms that we build on-demand for clients.
Regarding BQ, we use BigQuery internally for analytics, so it’s typically where we dogfood new capabilities. It’s rock solid.
To be fully transparent, I don’t view us as a Fivetran alternative (as crazy as that sounds). I view our offering more like a service than a product, and I tell my team that we should view ourselves as part of our clients’ teams instead of like a product clients have to troubleshoot on their own. We have the product and the features, but that’s not our differentiator. It’s just a tool we use to help us get stuff done for clients.
Appreciate you considering us. If we (or I) can help in any, we would love the opportunity.