3 Airbyte alternatives to consider in 2026

Airbyte offers several types of integration solutions, including an extract transform load (ETL) product, a reverse ETL offering, an embedded ETL platform, and an agentic integration solution.

We’ll break down the best alternative solution for each of these categories, but to recap our analysis:

Merge

Merge offers two products that let you add hundreds of integrations to your SaaS software and/or agents.

Top features

• Merge Unified lets you add 250+ customer-facing integrations through its Unified APIs

• Merge Agent Handler lets your agents access thousands of tools across dozens of MCP servers

• Both products come with built-in observability features (e.g., automated issue alerts and fully-searchable logs) and integration maintenance support

When to choose Merge over Airbyte

• You only need product and/or agentic integrations. Merge’s resources are fully allocated towards these products and they’ve spent countless time building and improving each

Airbyte’s competing solutions (Airbyte Embedded and Airbyte Agent Engine) are just one of the company's many products, so they likely receive less resource support. The latter is also in private beta, so you may need to wait a while before accessing it.

• You want to review customer case studies. Merge has dozens of case studies across its products, including ones with Ramp, Mistral AI, and Drata. Airbyte doesn’t have any public case studies for their embedded or agentic products

• You’d like to review pricing information before speaking to sales. Merge’s pricing pages outline all the details you need before deciding whether to speak to sales or sign up. Airbyte, on the other hand, doesn’t offer explicit pricing information for either their embedded or agentic products 

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Fivetran

Similar to Airbyte, Fivetran offers a suite of integration solutions for your internal business intelligence and go-to-market teams and your product.

Top features

• Fivetran’s core product offers 700+ connectors out of the box. These span nearly every software category, from CRM solutions to learning management systems to project management platforms

• When there isn’t an existing connector, you can leverage Fivetran’s Connector SDK, which is a Python-based development framework, to build custom data connectors more easily

• You’ll have access to enterprise-grade security features, like data encryption at rest and in transit, the ability to block data from replicating, and customer-managed keys

When to choose Fivetran over Airbyte

• You want to test out the product for free. Airbyte only makes its open-source software free, while Fivetran offers free monthly usage limits for core adoption activities, like connection, transformation, and activation usage

• You’re looking for case studies with enterprise companies. Airbyte offers a few enterprise case studies (e.g., Peloton); Fivetran’s library is significantly larger and spans more industries. For example, they have case studies with Pfizer, Activision, Coupa, and Saks

• You’d like to work with a vendor-led professional services team. Fivetran includes a variety of professional service packages to help you adopt the platform successfully. Airbyte has a network of partners that can help, but this requires working with a separate vendor, which can take additional time and has risks (e.g., partner isn’t fluent in Airbyte and/or your use case)

Matillion 

Matillion lets you streamline all kinds of data pipeline workflows for business intelligence or AI projects.

Top features

• Matillion offers “Maia agents” to create custom connectors, summarize pipeline runs, and even build data transformation pipelines from scratch

• Access hundreds of pre-built connectors, including ones with data warehouse platforms like Amazon Redshift, Databricks, and Google BigQuery, to build robust ETL pipelines quickly
  

• Matillion offers enterprise-grade security. This includes a pushdown architecture that ensures data processing occurs within your own cloud data warehouse

When to choose Matillion over Airbyte

• You only need a pipeline development platform. Matillion is purpose-built for supporting ETL pipelines. If you know that this is your only integration need in the short and medium term (it may be hard to forecast long-term needs), Matillion is likely the better choice

• You want to use an agent to support data pipeline builds and enhancements. Matillion’s agent can support seemingly endless tasks to support your engineers, saving them time and enabling them to focus on the less tedious parts of building and maintaining data pipelines 

• ‍You’d like to use an intuitive drag-and-drop UI for designing pipeline workflows. Matillion’s low-code UI makes it easy for employees in non-engineering roles to also review ETL workflows, identify improvements, and implement them

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