As a data engineer, you might know how challenging it could be to collect the right data from diverse sources — and an even bigger challenge to do so at the speed your business demands.

To solve those challenges, many companies and data engineers have started using data integration tools to speed up the workflow and deliver usable data to data scientists and analysts for business intelligence.

There're hundreds of cases where data integration tool becomes handy, for example:

We compiled a list of the 10 best data integration tools worth looking at. But first things first…

What is a data integration tool?

Data integration software lets engineers extract, manage, and combine all the data from multiple sources in one single platform. Depending on data integration software, you can write a custom algorithm to get most of the data, transform, and load it to the target database. Later that data can be used for machine learning, deep learning, and business intelligence.

What is a data integration tool?
What is a data integration tool?

What are the different types of integration software?

There are three types of data integration software depending on hosting options:

  1. Application/on-premise data integration software: To work with these types of software, you need to install them on our operating systems, and the software configurations get saved locally.
  2. Cloud-based data integration software: You don't have to install anything on our operation to work with this software. You can save your work on the cloud. This type of software is popularly known as iPaaS (Integration Platform As A Service)
  3. Hybrid data integration software: Hybrid software possess the ability of both on-prem and cloud software. You can start working locally by downloading the software and saving the work on the cloud.

What is the best data integration tool?

Here’s a list of the top 10 data integration tools widely used by data engineers and all sizes of organizations.

We'll take a closer look at the iPaaS solutions and review them one by one!

n8n

n8n is a popular cloud and self-hosted data integration tool for workflow automation. You can design simple to complex data workflows by dragging and dropping nodes and connecting them.

It’s important that this solution has data integration features such as trigger-based workflows that allow data engineers to automate repetitive tasks and simplify the integration process. You can easily schedule a workflow to run it at a specific time or trigger it once a specific event criterion is met.

n8n data integration tool
n8n data integration tool

Pros:

Cons:

  • It offers many features, and beginners might feel overwhelmed by the provided features
  • Python is only available in beta or workaround possible
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You can still connect n8n with other programming languages thanks to the extensible nature of the tool. This approach (writing API around some code that executes a script with a predefined set of query/body parameters) allows connecting n8n with Python, R, etc.

Pricing:

  • Self-hostable plans are free forever
  • Cloud plan starts from €20/month - 20 Active workflows

Note: All paid plans come with 99.99 uptime & 24/7 monitoring

Rivery

It is a purely cloud-based advanced ETL tool. You can consume data from any data source and load them to your data warehouse for business intelligence and analytics.

Pros:

  • Supports ETL & reverse ETL process
  • With native support for Python, you can build Python-based workflows
  • The built-in versioning system, so you can always roll back to the previous version if something goes wrong
  • You can load data to multiple destinations at once

Cons:

  • Not for solo data engineers or solopreneurs, as it doesn't allow account creation without a company
  • It doesn't have a self-hostable plan, and support

Pricing:

  • Starter - $0.75/RPU Credit
  • Professional - $1.20/RPU Credit
  • Enterprise - Need to contact the Rivery sales team to get a quote

Skyvia

Skyvia is another iPaaS tool. You can quickly build a workflow by connecting to the source and the target, and each connection comes with a set of parameters. You can select the required parameters and schedule the execution of the workflow. Each workflow can perform data import, export, replication, and synchronization.

Pros:

  • It auto-detects changes in connected data sources, synchronizes the data, and loads the updated data to the data warehouse.
  • Export data into CSV format, and can export using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) method
  • Workflow monitoring & alerting
  • Cloud backup of workflows and data

Cons:

  • It has a complex user interface, and it is hard to figure out workflow options
  • It doesn't have drag and drop workflow builder

Pricing:

  • Free - $0/month
  • Basic - $15/month
  • Standard - $79/month
  • Professional - $399/month

Note: All pricings billed annually.

Dell Boomi

It is a no-code data integration tool. You can visualize the data flow that helps create bug-free data pipelines. It also allows you to deploy workflows on the cloud, and you can manage workflows from the centralized dashboard.

Pros:

  • It allows you to build and scale your APIs
  • Automatically detects the sources and provides suggestions and recommendations for best practices for the selected data source

Cons:

  • Minimal features compared to its competitors

Pricing:

Pricing plans are unavailable on the website, and you need to contact the Dell Boomi sales team to get a quote.

Note: You can try all the pro features of Dell Boomi for a free 30-day trial. Later you can choose to continue or cancel the subscription.

Talend

Talend data fabric is an E2E (end-to-end) data integration that allows you to consume the data from any legacy data source, transform the received with 1000+ connectors and load them to the data warehouse. Using its data profiling and lineage feature, we can perform quality checks, monitor the ingested data, and send them for business intelligence.

Pros

  • It offers tools to perform tasks like ETL/ELT and CDC (Change data capture)
  • Integrate 3rd-party API and effortlessly share the data

Cons

  • Version control is very complex

Pricing:

Pricing plans are unavailable on the website, and you need to contact the Talend sales team to get a quote.

Jitterbit

Jitterbit Harmony is a popular cloud-based ETL data integration tool within algorithms that allow you to transfer a vast amount of data through your connected data pipeline. Using Jitterbit, you can create APIs from single and multiple databases.

Pros:

  • Easy to use interface, you can rapidly build workflows that handle vast data
  • You can connect to any on-prem and cloud data sources

Cons:

  • Only a few connectors are available
  • It needs version control, which might require when building complex workflow or building out of the box, and there is the chance of logical errors in a workflow

Pricing:

Pricing plans are unavailable on the website, and you need to contact the Jitterbit sales team to get a quote.

MuleSoft

MuleSoft allows you to build APIs by connecting with the offered connectors and designing simple & complex workflow using. You will get many built-in functions to filter, query, and map your received data to the data warehouse.

Pros:

  • Errors and exception handling is straightforward
  • You can create custom nodes by using MuleSoft SDK
  • Monitoring and alerting of workflow

Cons:

  • You can't schedule the workflow tasks
  • It is hard to scale your data, and you might need to again re-configure your workflows

Pricing:

Pricing plans are unavailable on the website. You need to contact the Mulesoft sales team to get a quote.

Integrate.io

Integrate.io allows you to drag and drop nodes to the workflow from the sidebar and visualize the data pipeline. Once satisfied with the workflow, you can execute the workflow, and it will run based on the configuration you have made.

Pros:

  • It supports the reverse ETL process, sending back the extracted data as it is to the data source.
  • Up to three workflows can run at a time
  • Support workflow version control
  • Manage workflows programmatically using its API

Cons:

  • It offers many features, but it will take time to familiarize yourself with the tool.
  • Errors and exception handling is complex, and it is hard to find the bugs.

Pricing:

  • Starter - $15K/year
  • Professional - $25K/year
  • Enterprise - Contact the Sales team

Fivetran

Fivetran allows you to design and build data pipelines on the cloud by connecting data sources and databases to centralized data warehouses for business intelligence and analysis. It automatically syncs data between connected nodes and updates them in data warehouses.

Pros:

  • Built-in functions and parameters for nodes
  • Unified dashboard to monitor and track the progress of the data pipeline

Cons:

  • Detailed logging of your data flow is unavailable
  • It lacks many connectors, which makes it a limited possibility with Fivetran

Pricing:

  • Starter - $1/credit
  • Standard - $1.5/credit
  • Enterprise - $2/credit

DBT

DBT allows data engineers to design and test the workflows on the cloud before deploying them to production. You can connect to any legacy data source and target destination and execute them. You can write custom scripts for the data transformation.

Pros:

  • Provides built-in templates for testing data to ensure high-quality data
  • Supports version control
  • Schedules future workflows

Cons:

  • No support functions and parameters support for selected nodes. Instead, they have dbt macros.
  • Handling projects and their environmental variables are challenging

Pricing:

  • Developer - Free Forever - 1/developer
  • Team - $100/developer/month
  • Enterprise - Custom - Contact sale team

Wrap-Up

Choosing a data integration tool is no easy task. Data engineers have many factors to consider. One platform isn’t better than another — they all have different features, audiences and technical capabilities.

We hope you found this article helpful. If you do, please share it without your friends and fellow data engineers, or you might want to send it to your boss so that he can reduce your workload.

If you want to try one of the most powerful data integration tools, then try n8n, it allows you to get started quickly on the desktop and the cloud.

What's next?

Where to go from here? Below we have listed the prevalent integration and workflows on n8n that might be helpful and worth your time.