Matillion VS Striim

Matillion ETL is an on-premises ETL platform that was founded before the advent of cloud data warehouses, and is still primarily on premises. But its main destinations today are cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery.

Matillion combines many features to extract, transform, and load (ETL) data. More recently Matillion has been adding cloud options as part of the Matillion Data Productivity Cloud. It consists of a Hub for administration and billing, a choice of working with the on-premises Matillion ETL deployed as “private cloud” or Matillion Data Loader, a free cloud batch and CDC replication tool built on Matillion ETL but lacking many of its capabilities including transforms.

As with most of the mature ETL tools, Matillion has a strong set of features, but is harder to learn and use and is more expensive.

Perhaps one of the biggest advantages of Matillion is its ETL and orchestration, especially when compared to various ELT tools.

• Advanced transforms: Matillion ETL supports a variety of transform options, from drag-and-drop to code editors for complex transformations.
• Orchestration: Matillion offers advanced graphical workflow design and orchestration.
• Pushdown optimization: Matillion ETL can push down transformations to the target data warehouse.
• Reverse ETL: Matillion provides the ability to extract data from a source, cleanse it, and insert data back into the source.

• SaaS: Matillion ETL, its flagship product, is on-premises only. It does offer Data Loader, which is built on ETL, as a free cloud service for replication. There is also integration between Matillion ETL and the Matillion Cloud Hub for billing. While you can migrate work in Data Loader to ETL if you choose, it is a migration from the cloud to your own managed environment. 
• Free tier: Matillion Data Loader is free, but it’s limited and doesn’t support transforms. This can make it challenging to fully evaluate the tool before committing to a paid plan.
• Connectors: Matillion has fewer connectors than most (150+ in total). You can invoke external APIs to access other systems, but access to all your sources and destinations can become an issue. Matillion is only used for loading data warehouses. 
• No CDC: Matillion ETL CDC, which was based on Amazon DMS (in turn based on Attunity) has been deprecated. So right now there is no CDC option with Matillion. 
• Schema evolution: Matillion does support adding columns to existing destination tables, deleting a column, and handling data type changes as sources change. But adding a table requires creating a new pipeline and there is no automation for schema evolution.
• dbt integration for SaaS: While Matillion ETL has a connector for dbt, there is no integration between Data Loader and dbt.
• Pricing: Compared to more modern ELT vendors, Matillion is expensive. It starts at $1000/month for 500 credits where each credit is a virtual core-hour similar to an AWS, Azure, or Google virtual core. This is really in the $1000s per month minimum. Data productivity Cloud consumes a credit per running task every 15 minutes, and only consumes when tasks are running. The smallest ETL unit is two cores, which means you consume 2 cores an hour, or nearly 3x the 500 credits every month.

Matillion doesn’t have a pay-as-you-go model. It starts at $1000/month for 500 credits where each credit is a virtual core-hour similar to an AWS, Azure, or Google virtual core. Pricing increases 25% per credit for advanced and 35% for enterprise with higher base commitments.

This is really in the $1000s per month minimum. Data productivity Cloud consumes a credit per running task every 15 minutes, and only consumes when tasks are running. The smallest ETL unit is two cores, which means you consume 2 cores an hour, or nearly 3x the 500 credits every month.

Striim is a real-time data integration and streaming platform that simplifies the movement of data from various sources, including databases, cloud services, and messaging systems. Striim offers out-of-the-box connectors for real-time data capture, replication, and stream processing, making it a competitive option for enterprise-grade streaming architectures.

• Low-Latency Streaming: Striim specializes in low-latency data movement.
• Enterprise-Grade Features: Striim offers built-in support for exactly-once processing, data transformations, in-flight processing, and scalability.
• Comprehensive Integration: Striim provides pre-built connectors to a wide array of databases (including Oracle and SQL Server), cloud storage systems, messaging platforms like Kafka, and more.

• Complex Pricing Model: Striim’s pricing model can be complex, with costs depending on factors such as data volume, number of sources, and the specific features used. It may not be as cost-effective for smaller businesses with modest data needs.
• Vendor Lock-In: Like other managed streaming solutions, Striim can create a dependency on its platform, making migration to alternative solutions or self-hosted setups more challenging.
• Limited Open Source: While Striim provides a wide range of features, it is not an open-source platform, meaning users have less flexibility and control over the code and architecture compared to open-source options like Kafka and Debezium.

Striim operates on a subscription model with pricing tiers based on the number of data sources, targets, and data volumes. Pricing is typically custom-quoted based on the organization’s specific needs. Tiers start at $1,000/mo + Compute $0.75 /vcpu/hr & Data Transfer $0.10/GB in, $0.10/GB out.

Estuary is the right time data platform that replaces fragmented data stacks with one dependable system for data movement. Instead of juggling separate tools for CDC, batch ELT, streaming, and app syncs, teams use Estuary to move data from databases, SaaS apps, files, and streams into warehouses, lakes, operational stores, and AI systems at the cadence they choose: sub second, near real time, or scheduled.

The company was founded in 2019, built on Gazette, a battle tested streaming storage layer that has powered high volume event workloads for years. That foundation lets Estuary mix CDC, streaming, and batch in a single catalog and gives customers exactly once delivery, deterministic recovery, and targeted backfills across all of their pipelines.

Unlike traditional ELT tools that focus on batch loads into a warehouse, Estuary stores every event in collections that can be reused for multiple destinations and use cases. Once a change is captured, it is written once to durable storage and then fanned out to any number of targets without reloading the source. This reduces load on primary systems, provides consistent history for analytics and AI, and makes it easy to replay or reprocess data when schemas or downstream models change.

Estuary can run as a multi tenant cloud service, as a private data plane inside the customer’s cloud, or in a BYOC model where the customer owns the infrastructure and Estuary manages the control plane. This gives security and compliance teams the control they expect from in house systems with the convenience of a managed platform.

Estuary also has broad packaged and custom connectivity, making it one of the top ETL tools. The platform ships with a growing set of high quality native connectors for databases, warehouses, lakes, queues, SaaS tools, and AI targets. Estuary also supports many open source connectors where needed, so teams can consolidate around one system while still covering niche sources and destinations. Customers consistently highlight predictable pricing, strong reliability, and partner level support as key reasons they choose Estuary instead of Fivetran, Airbyte, or DIY stacks.

Estuary Flow is highly rated on G2, with users highlighting its real-time capabilities and ease of use.

• Right time pipelines: Estuary lets you choose the cadence of each pipeline, from sub second streaming to periodic batch, so cost and freshness match the workload.
• One platform for all data movement: Handles CDC, batch loads, and streaming in one product, which reduces tool sprawl and simplifies operations.
• Dependable replication: Exactly once delivery, deterministic recovery, and targeted backfills keep pipelines stable even when sources or schemas change.
• Efficient CDC: Log based CDC captures inserts, updates, and deletes once and reuses them for many destinations, reducing load on operational databases.
• High scale architecture: Gazette and collections support large, continuous data streams with reliable throughput across multiple targets.
• Modern transforms: Supports SQL and TypeScript based transformations in motion, and integrates cleanly with dbt for warehouse side ELT.
• Flexible deployment choices: Available as cloud SaaS, private data plane, or BYOC, giving enterprises strong control over data residency and security.
• Predictable total cost of ownership: Transparent pricing based on data volume and connector instances avoids MAR based surprises and is easy to forecast.
• Fast time to value: A guided UI, CLI, and templates help most teams build their first dependable pipelines in hours instead of weeks.
• Partner level support: Customers report quick connector delivery, responsive troubleshooting, and SLAs that make Estuary feel like an extension of their team.

• On premises connectors: Estuary has 200+ native connectors and supports 500+ Airbyte, Meltano, and Stitch open source connectors. But if you need on-premises app or data warehouse connectivity, make sure you have all the connectivity you need.
• Graphical ETL: Estuary has been more focused on SQL and dbt than graphical transformations. While it does infer data types and convert between sources and targets, there is currently no graphical transformation UI.

Of the various ELT and ETL vendors, Estuary is the lowest total cost option. Estuary only charges $0.50 per GB of data moved from each source or to each target, and $100 per connector per month. Rivery, the next lowest cost option, is the only other vendor that publishes pricing of 1 RPU per 100MB, which is $7.50 to $12.50 per GB depending on the plan you choose. Estuary becomes the lowest cost option by the time you reach the 10s of GB/month. By the time you reach 1TB a month Estuary is 10x lower cost than the rest.