Open-Source ETL Tools Comparison

For all of your extraction, transformation, and loading needs, here is a helpful list
of open source ETL tools to compare.

Open source data integration tools can be a low-cost alternative to commercial

packaged data integration solutions. And just like commercial solutions, they
have their benefits and drawbacks.
If you do not have the time or resources in-house to build a custom ETL solution
— or the funding to purchase one — an open source solution may be a practical
option. Further, open source ETL solutions can be a great fit for smaller projects,
or places where data analysis is not mission critical. Keep in mind that most open
source ETL solutions will still require some configuration and setup work (if not
actual coding). So even if you avoid having to hand code a solution, you still may
need to have some systems or programming expertise available.
Open-Source ETL Tools Overview
Open source implementations play an important role in the world of ETL, helping
to further research, visibility, and developmental standards. Open source
communities include a large number of testers which can help improve and
accelerate the tools' development. Some people prefer to only use open source
solutions. Of course, the most notable feature of open source ETL products is
that they are often significantly less expensive than commercial solutions.
The four basic constituencies that typically adopt open source ETL tools are:
• Independent software vendors (ISV) looking for embeddable data integration
— costs are reduced and the savings are passed on customers; data
integration, migration and transformation capabilities are incorporated as
an embedded component; memory footprint of the end product is reduced
in comparison to large commercial offers
• System integrators (SI) looking for inexpensive integration tooling — open
source ETL software allows system integrators to deliver integration
capabilities significantly faster and with a higher quality level than by
custom building the capabilities
• Enterprise departmental developers looking for a local solution — using the
free ETL tools technology by larger enterprises to support smaller
initiatives
• Mid-market companies with smaller budgets and less complex requirements —
small companies are more likely to support open source ETL providers as
they have less demanding needs for data integration software
While some open source projects specialize in a single ETL or data integration
function (some tools may support extracting data only, others might only serve to
move data, for example), a number of open source projects are capable of
performing a wider set of functions.
Popular Open-Source ETL Tools
This is not an exhaustive list, but it does cover many of the popular offerings.
Apache Airflow
Apache Airflow is a project that builds a platform offering automatic authoring,
scheduling, and monitoring of workflows. Workflows are authored as directed
acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The scheduler executes tasks on arrays of
workers and follows dependencies as specified. The command line utilities allow
users to perform surgeries on DAGs, and the user interface allows users to
visualize production pipelines, monitor progress, and troubleshoot issues.
Open Source version is limited: No
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform that offers publish and
subscribe to streams of records (similar to a message queue), supports fault-
tolerant storing of streams of records, and allows processing streams of records
as they occur.
Kafka is typically used for building real-time streaming data pipelines that either
move data between systems or applications, or transform or react to the streams
of data. The core concepts of this project include running as a cluster on one or
more servers, strong streams of records in categories (or topics), and working
with records, where each record includes a key, a value, and a timestamp. Kafka
has four core APIs: the Producer API, the Consumer API, the Streams API, and
the Connector API.
Open Source version is limited: No
Apache NiFi
The Apache NiFi project is used to automate and manage the flow of information
between systems, and its design model allows NiFi to be a very effective platform
for building powerful and scalable dataflows. NiFi's fundamental design concepts
are related to the central ideas of Flow-Based Programming. The main features
of this project include a highly configurable web-based user interface (for
example, including dynamic prioritization and allowing back pressure), data
provenance, extensibility, and security (options for SSL, SSH, HTTPS, and so
on).
Open Source version is limited: No
CloverETL
CloverETL offers an open source/community version of its engine. The engine is
a Java library and does not include any visualization or UI components. It does,
however, include access to ETL/Data transformation features used in the
commercial version.
CloverETL's Community Edition offers a visual tool with basic data transformation
capabilities to the general community at no cost. It permits execution of data
transformations at full speed, but it includes a fairly limited set of transformation
components.
Open Source version is limited: Yes
Jaspersoft
Jaspersoft data integration software extracts, transforms, and loads data from
different sources into a data warehouse or data mart for reporting and analysis
purposes. The community version is available as open source.
Open Source version is limited: Yes
KETL
According to its SourceForge page, KETL is a production-ready ETL platform
and its engine is built upon an open, multi-threaded, XML-based architecture.
The product is designed to assist in the development and deployment of data
integration efforts which require ETL and scheduling. It appears to have been last
updated in 2015.
Open Source version is limited: No
Pentaho Kettle
Pentaho Kettle is the component of Pentaho responsible for the ETL processes.
It enables users to ingest, blend, cleanse, and prepare diverse data from any
source. Pentaho also includes in-line analytics and visualization tools. This
community version is free, but offers fewer capabilities than the paid version.
Open Source version is limited: Yes
Talend Open Studio
Talend offers Open Studio for Data Integration as a limited-functionality open
source (Apache license) version of its Data Management Platform. It offers
connectors for various RDBMS, SaaS, packaged apps, and technologies.
Open Source version is limited: Yes
Limitations of Open-Source ETL Tools
When used appropriately, and with their limitations in mind, today's free ETL
tools can be solid components in an ETL pipeline.
It should be noted that these offerings are continuously improved, just as most
commercial products. The current drawbacks for open source ETL tools include
limited support for:
• Enterprise application connectivity
• Robust management and error handling capabilities
• Non-RDBMS connectivity
• Change data capture (CDC)
• Integrated data quality management and profiling
• Large data volumes and small batch windows
• Complex transformation requirements
Even so, many customers are not looking for large and expensive data
integration suites. Consider open source ETL technologies where they can be an
efficient and reliable alternative to the time consuming and error prone approach
of custom coding data integration requirements.
The most popular open source vendors are still not truly community-driven
projects. This may be an issue going forward as the number and complexity of
data sources continue to increase. More investment is needed, from a wider
community, to build out and encourage the development of open source ETL
tools. Note also that often the open source versions are feature-limited versions
of commercial products. In the end, you may trade features for lower cost, or you
may have to do more configuration and setup to have the features you want and
still maintain an open source approach.
The open source tools and solutions listed above may not be able to solve the
complex, dynamic problems faced by today's data-dependent enterprises. A true
solution needs to handle not only the vast array of data sources that currently
exist, but those that are being created every day. This tsunami of data could
overwhelm under-sized implementations.
Modern ETL Solution
A modern ETL solution requires a modern ETL platform: a system that supports
importing a vast array of enterprise on-prem and web-based data sources into
your cloud data warehouse. New data sources (various social media, marketing,
and monitoring services, for example) are becoming available constantly, so
modern ETL solutions need to be flexible and well-maintained/tested. They need
to be able to handle schema changes and structured and semi-structured data.
Alooma's easy-to-use data pipeline as a service provides a data streaming
platform to support both batch and high volume real-time, low-latency data
integration requirements. Alooma's flexible enrichment capabilities enable
advanced and complex data preparation and enhancement of any data source
before loading into any data warehouse. Alooma's platform includes the
Restream Queue to handle errors and ensure data integrity.