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.
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Matillion
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Matillion is a data pipeline platform used to build and manage pipelines. Matillion empowers data teams with no-code and AI capabilities to be more productive, integrating data wherever it lives and delivering data that’s ready for AI and analytics.
$2.50
Pay as you go per user
Pricing
dbt
Matillion
Editions & Modules
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Developer: For Individuals
$2.50/credit
Pay as you go per user
Basic
$1000
per month 500 prepaid credits (additional credits: $2.18/credit)
Advanced
$2000
per month 750 prepaid credits (additional credits: $2.73/credit)
Enterprise
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Pricing Offerings
dbt
Matillion
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Billed directly via cloud marketplace on an hourly basis, with annual subscriptions available depending on the customer's cloud data warehouse provider.
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.
Great: Need to query simpler APIs, or utilize well known services such as GSheets etc.? Matillion has got some of the best and easiest to use connectors out there. Not so great: Do you need have a competent CI/CD flow that you will be able to update / compare from Matillion as well as other sources at the same time? Good luck, you will need to be extra careful, as you might have to have a deeper dive into your servers Terminal each time you have a git conflict.
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
Static and monolithic, it will show its limits when running multiple concurrent jobs.
Github and versioning implementation is messy and broken. Don't use it.
There's not way to see/query the system resources, just wait for a server to crash due to out of memory. An admin panel would be appreciated + some env variables with updated info.
API implementation is cumbersome and limited.
There's no concept of hub and worker engine, everything happens of the same server (designing workflows and executing them). Having separate light ETL engines to run job could be better. (sort of docker/kubernetes/lambda functions).
Handling of variables is limited especially for returned values from sub components.
Some components could return more metadata at the end of their execution instead of the standard one.
Billing is badly designed not taking into account that the server is hosted by the client. Expensive.
We had several issue with migration where starting a new instance was required and then migrating the content. It was painful and time consuming also have to deal with support and engineering team on Matillion side.
CDC doesn't work as expected or it is not a mature product yet.
Matillion is easy to use and flexible to debug. Performance are good and support is giving us a good service level. There are still some technical points to be developed more (such as SAP extraction). but easy flows are really fast to be developed. We are also using a tool for migration from other tools, and it is useful as Matillion is producing XML code.
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.
Easy tasks are really easy, and complex tasks are still possible. With prior knowledge of general data warehousing principles and experience with other data transformation tools, it's straightforward to get familiar with and use Matillion. I initially used minimal external support from a partner for some more complex tasks but very soon could work entirely independently with Matillion.
Overall, I've found Matillion to be responsive and considerate. I feel like they value us as a customer even when I know they have customers who spend more on the product than we do. That speaks to a motive higher than money. They want to make a good product and a good experience for their customers. If I have any complaint, it's that support sometimes feels community-oriented. It isn't always immediately clear to me that my support requests are going to a support engineer and not to the community at large. Usually, though, after a bit of conversation, it's clear that Matillion is watching and responding. And responses are generally quick in coming.
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.
We selected Matillion primarily because of it's ability to connect to numerous data sources and easily create transformation jobs. While Fivetran does a better job managing and examining deltas, it is not easy to use and is very non user friendly. SSIS was not a good fit for our team and required a significant amount of attention and server management that we did not want to invest in.
We're using Matillion on EC2 instances, and we have about 20 projects for our clients in the same instance. Sometimes, we're struggling to manage schedules for all projects because thread management is not visible, and we can't see the process at the instance level.
Time savings -- we could custom code nearly everything Matillion does, but it would take days/weeks instead of minutes/hours.
There's a bit of a learning curve to truly unlock Matillion's potential, and that can be frustrating for some new users, but once you get over that curve, the possibilities are endless.
It allows us to centralize the hundreds of way to bring data in, so that even if you have to troubleshoot what someone else wrote, it's easy to jump in and understand what is happening.
