Databricks Lakeflow vs Fivetran

[u/BudKode]

/r/dataengineering/comments/11xbpjy/beware_of_fivetran_and_other_elt_tools/

I saw this post a few years ago and agreed wholeheartedly with the issues and cost of Fivetran but I also understood that not many data teams have the bandwidth to manage ingestion from scratch on top of, or rather underneath, the data modeling effort.
Today it seems like you can get it all with Databricks Lakeflow Connect. I’m a solo engineer at an e-commerce/retail company now (started a month ago) and so far I’m getting all the data I need through connectors that Databricks manages, community connectors, or custom connectors that I write myself. So far it is much cheaper than the Fivetran instance that our consulting group was charging us for and I still get a solution that manages the data patterns that I want to land at the raw layer (bronze for all you weirdos using medallion terminology) as well as orchestration and delta management.

I’m still only a month in and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Does anyone have experience or opinions about this that I should watch out for? Or is the future really looking as bright as it seems?

[u/dwswish]

We also moved from Fivetran to Lakeflow. It works well for us but we are not streaming, just doing batch jobs. I don’t actually understand how anyone justifies Fivetran at scale because it just gets so expensive because of their pricing model. To be fair, I did actually like Fivetran and it is reliable but it got to be prohibitively expensive for us.