Fivetran Alternative: Real-Time Streaming at 8x Cheaper with Streamkap

Achieve real-time (sub-second) streaming at an average of an 8th of the cost with Streamkap. Migrate your database pipelines from Fivetran to Streamkap without losing functionality or interoperability — and get your data, faster and cheaper.

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Streamkap is the Fivetran alternative for streaming

We know from experience: building a batch ETL company, and maintaining APIs, is a challenge. It’s understandable that Fivetran has led the way with its easy-to-use cloud ETL service and simplified API management. While there have always been lower-cost alternatives to Fivetran, we’ve found many of them unstable. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

At Streamkap, we felt that we could take the good and essential parts of Fivetran — ease of use, UI, security — and focus only on streaming, improving upon speed and support at a lower cost. 

We challenged ourselves: Could we make streaming as easy to learn and easy to use as Fivetran — but at a fraction of the cost?

Today, Streamkap is the 10x faster, 8x cheaper alternative to Fivetran — while providing more hands-on personal support. Compared to Fivetran, Streamkap is:

• 10x faster: We only provide real-time, sub-second pipelines.
• 8x lower cost: We have a simple pricing model of cost per GB of data (approximately 5 million Monthly Active Rows per 1 GB).

Fivetran vs Streamkap: Monthly Cost

Fivetran charges based on Monthly Active Rows (MARs). This is the number of rows synced from a source to a destination, including new and updated rows.

Streamkap is an event streaming platform. Since events aren't always coming from databases, we charge per 1 GB of data transferred, equating to approximately 5 million MARs in the context of databases and Fivetran’s pricing model.

Let's look at an example with Snowflake as the destination.

Since Fivetran has limitations in speed, ingestion mode, and high costs, we've decided to look at each example they default to on their pricing page using upserts and inserts.

Summary Cost and Latency Table

In the table below, we have used a range of row counts to show how Streamkap compares, from extremely low volume to high volume row counts.

We have assumed 5 million MARs per 1 GB of data. This is an average we have seen across Streamkap and many public datasets. Regardless, Streamkap will guarantee this number for migration. Fivetran’s costs have been taken from their public pricing page, accessed May 15, 2024.

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Fivetran vs Streamkap Support

At Streamkap, we’ve prioritized support — our goal is to provide a comprehensive real-time streaming alternative with the same support that you’ve become accustomed to at an eighth of the cost.

Streamkap support includes:

• Slack Connect as well as in-app chat.
• 24/7 proactively monitored pipelines.
• Automatically scaled/managed systems.
• No need to manage real-time systems.
• Full pipeline verification.

Connectors Supported

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Connectivity Supported

Fivetran vs Streamkap Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) refer to the guaranteed uptime a company offers. Overall, Streamkap guarantees 99.99% uptime — while Fivetran guarantees 99.9%.

Fivetran SLAs

For Standard, Enterprise, and Business Critical Plan Level Customers, Fivetran guarantees that the Core Services will be available and operational at least 99.9% of the time.

For Enterprise and Business Critical Plan Level Customers, Fivetran guarantees to reliably load data on schedule at least 99.9% of the time for properly set up connectors.

Streamkap SLAs

Streamkap has an SLA of 99.99% uptime.

What does this translate into regarding the maximum allowed downtime per year?

Fivetran vs Streamkap Security

Both Fivetran and Streamkap offer SOC 2 Type 2 compliance. 

Fivetran offers HIPAA compliance while this is coming soon for Streamkap’s Cloud Offering. 

Streamkap provides a Bring Your Own Cloud version for the ultimate data security, residency and privacy compliance. Fivetran only offers a cloud hosted version. 

Fivetran vs Streamkap Transformations

Unlike Fivetran, Streamkap also offers in stream processing to further save costs and keep your pipelines in real-time. Examples are the un-nesting of nested data from sources such as MongoDB, which can happen sub-second and be inserted into the destinations as you need.

Kafka and Flink for Data Engineers

Under the hood of Streamkap we run Kafka, Debezium, and Flink. Everyone knows the struggles that can be experienced in deploying real-time systems, but with Streamkap, we’ve built a plug-and-play system that data engineers can use without the requirements of developers and DevOps.

Snowflake Warehouse Cost Savings

When it comes to ingesting Snowflake, switching the ingestion mode to Inserts and using Snowpipe Streaming can also reduce Snowflake Warehouse costs by 3x while also reducing latency. See our case study with SpotOn for for more details on Snowflake savings. 

Inserts are append-only, while upserts are inserts and updates combined (upserts). Learn more in the Streamkap docs about inserts/upserts.

Streamkap supports both upserts and inserts for real-time pipelines. However, inserts can result in faster pipelines, lower costs, and a change table history.

Let’s assume:

• 1 billion monthly active rows and, therefore, 200 GB of data
• Small Snowflake warehouse (2 credits) running 24/7
• $2.50 per Snowflake credit

How Snowpipe Streaming Costs Work

Snowpipe Streaming costs are based on both ingestion time and migration cost. 

Ingestion Time

• This is the streaming insert time.
• Calculated per hour of each client runtime multiplied by 0.01 credits.
• Client runtime is collected in seconds, meaning that 1 hour of client runtime is 3600 seconds.
• If Streamkap is actively sending rows in every second of a 30-day month, the Snowpipe Streaming cloud services charge for the month will be 30 days * 24 hrs * 1 client * 0.01 credits = 7.2 credits.
• Query Snowpipe Streaming Service costs in this table: SNOWPIPE_STREAMING_CLIENT_HISTORY View view (in Account Usage).‍

Migration Cost

• This is the automated background process with Snowflake.
• It is approximately 3 to 10 credits per TB of data. It will vary regarding the number of files generated which also depends on the rate of inserts.
• Query Snowpipe Streaming Migration costs in this table: SNOWPIPE_STREAMING_FILE_MIGRATION_HISTORY View view (in Account Usage).

As you can see, Snowpipe Streaming can result in many thousands of dollars in extra savings. Our example was for 200GB or 1 billion MARs, but Snowpipe Streaming is hardly any extra for even five billion MARs.

How to Switch to Streamkap in Five Steps

1. Look at your costs and usage with Fivetran and determine your monthly active row or GB usage.
2. Sign up to Streamkap at app.streamkap.com.
3. Create your pipeline:
   
   • Tutorials in app.
   • Docs at docs.streamkap.com.
   • In-app support.
   • Request slack connect.
4. Run both side by side, with the opportunity to check data quality during your 2-week free trial.
5. Switch to the new pipeline and save thousands while moving to real-time.