dbt vs. Liquibase

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
dbt
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
dbt is an SQL development environment, developed by Fishtown Analytics, now known as dbt Labs. The vendor states that with dbt, analysts take ownership of the entire analytics engineering workflow, from writing data transformation code to deployment and documentation. dbt Core is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, and paid Teams and Enterprise editions are available.N/A
Liquibase
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Liquibase is a database change management tool that extends DevOps best practices to the database, helping teams release software faster and safer by bringing the database change process into existing CI/CD automation. According to the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, elite performers are 3.4 times more likely to incorporate database change management into their process than low performers. Liquibase value proposition: Liquibase speeds up the development…N/A
Pricing
dbtLiquibase
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
dbtLiquibase
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
dbtLiquibase
Features
dbtLiquibase
Data Transformations
Comparison of Data Transformations features of Product A and Product B
dbt
9.5
Ratings
15% above category average
Liquibase
-
Ratings
Simple transformations10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Complex transformations9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Modeling
Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
dbt
9.0
Ratings
12% above category average
Liquibase
-
Ratings
Data model creation9.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Metadata management8.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Business rules and workflow9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Collaboration10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Testing and debugging8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
dbtLiquibase
Small Businesses
Skyvia
Skyvia
Score 9.9 out of 10
DBeaver
DBeaver
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
Score 8.0 out of 10
DBeaver
DBeaver
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
Score 8.0 out of 10
DBeaver
DBeaver
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
dbtLiquibase
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.5
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
dbtLiquibase
Likelihood to Recommend
dbt (Data Build Tool) is best suited for doing the data transformation. dbt is just a transformation tool and it is not suitable for building a data pipeline which requires extraction of data and loading. dbt is well suited for SQL based transformation logic and it is less appropriate when transformation logic requires python.
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Any Codebase that does schema or table changes all the time for development or where Development and code is mostly in the database or SQL liquibase is a must. In a codebase where the database is pretty static or is just a place to dump data, liquibase is probably too much. You also need to have a team for it to really make sense. Doing a solo or small team project doing full version control on the database is probably more overhead than it is worth.
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Pros
  • user experience makes it easy to work with SQL and version control
  • customer success team and the dbt (data build tool) community help establish best practices
  • thorough and clear documentation
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  • Liquibase provides a clear error log that allows us to pinpoint what to troubleshoot.
  • The service does not deploy bad data, which helps us keep our databases clean.
  • Liquibase works with GitHub Actions as well as AWS Codebuild and AWS Lambda. The flexibility allows us to deploy the service in many different ways.
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Cons
  • Slow load times of the dbt cloud environment (they're working on it via a new UI though)
  • More out-of-the-box solutions for managing procedures, functions, etc would be nice to have, but honestly, it's pretty easy to figure out how to adapt dbt macros
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  • Reducing Compatibility issues, when we upgraded Liquibase from 4.2 to 4.9. The same changeset which we were able to run on successfully using 4.2, part of it was now failing when tried to deploy using 4.9
  • We are not able to see detailed logs (for different changes) in uDeploy when deploying changes through Liquibase
  • Liquibase should rollback the if any one of the changes fails.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
We are and will continue using Liquibase and it has become an integral part of our portfolio offering, any new product is by default adopting Liquibase stack.
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Usability
dbt is very easy to use. Basically if you can write SQL, you will be able to use dbt to get what you need done. Of course more advanced users with more technical skills can do more things.
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the database deployments helped teams with a increased productivity,
faster delivery and low risk.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Liquibase's customer support team has been very instrumental in helping us drive the whole Database CI/CD initiative. We have always received very quick resolution to our queries or any roadblock we hit. Right from setting up Liquibase in our environment to this date the Liquibase team has always helped us deliver quality and innovative solutions.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Build process takes a toll.
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Alternatives Considered
Matillion is graphical versus dbt, which is SQL code-based (that, of course, is a matter of personal preference and not an objective advantage). The integrated testing, documentation generation, lineage, etc., were additional criteria that led us to choose dbt.
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In my previous project and organization I have used Flyway for database change management and version control similar to Liquibase which I am currently using. Comparing it with Flyway, Liquibase provides more feature flexibility and enhancements to handle complex workflows with rollback capability and its usage of contexts and labels allow us to target changes to specific environments, which Flyway doesn’t support natively. Also Liquibase provides way to compare different schema and generate changelogs for syncing environments automatically where in it allows to have declarative schema management by using XML/YAML/SQL script format.
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Return on Investment
  • In 3 months we re-wrote the data warehouse (15-20 sources) in dbt with 3 developers.
  • We are using it continually for the past year with no issues.
  • Sorry, I don't have ROI numbers but the impact was huge.
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  • We are still in the early phases, where the costs are potentially greater than the benefit. Trying to get Liquibase integrated into a pipeline has taken time investment and required some trial and error.
  • We are still a relatively small shop with a relatively small number of schema changes (perhaps 1 every week or so). As such, we aren't at a place where we couldn't have managed control of this without a tool. However, there is no doubt that investing in a tool at this stage was the right move. Now we have established guidelines and a pattern for how to do schema changes in a way that will make things easily scalable as we continue to grow.
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