Fivetran vs Hevo Data
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
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The short answer
Both sides assessedFivetran compared with Hevo Data
Hevo is the alternative small teams reach for when Fivetran's monthly active rows make the bill hard to forecast: fixed published tiers by events, free to 1 million a month and $299 ($265 annually) for 5 million on Starter, with SOC 2 and HIPAA to match. Fivetran keeps the larger, more hardened connector catalog and the stronger reliability reputation on long-tail sources. Business-critical pipelines with budget favor Fivetran; teams that need to know next month's cost favor Hevo.
Hevo Data compared with Fivetran
Fivetran is the category benchmark, with a larger and more hardened connector catalog and a reliability reputation to match, billed on monthly active rows with a free tier around 500,000 rows. Hevo is cheaper and more predictable for small teams, publishing fixed tiers by events from $299 a month ($265 annually), with a free plan of 1 million events and comparable security certifications. Business-critical pipelines on long-tail sources favor Fivetran; a small team that needs to know next month's bill favors Hevo.
Choose Fivetran if
Data teams that need business-critical pipelines from major SaaS sources and databases to simply work, and would rather pay a premium than staff pipeline maintenance.
Choose Hevo Data if
Small data teams and technically capable analysts at growing companies who have a warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks) and want managed, reliable replication from SaaS tools and production databases at a predictable monthly price.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Fivetran | Hevo Data |
|---|---|---|
| Category | CDP | CDP |
| Starting price | Free for up to around 500,000 monthly active rows; paid usage from roughly $500 per month at modest volumes | $0 (Free, 1 million events a month); Starter from $299 per month, or $265 per month billed annually, for 5 million events |
| Pricing model | Consumption pricing based on monthly active rows, the count of unique rows inserted, updated, or deleted in a billing month, with per-row rates declining at volume. Free tier for small usage; enterprise agreements quoted annually. | Tiered subscriptions metered on events, where each row inserted, updated, or deleted in the destination counts as one event. Each tier has a slider of event quotas with published monthly and annual prices; usage above the quota is charged on demand per 1,000 events. |
| Free plan | Around 500,000 monthly active rows across connectors | 1 million events a month on free sources only, up to 5 users, 1-hour scheduling, no credit card required |
| Free trial | 14-day full-feature trial plus a permanent free tier | 14 days |
| Best for | Data teams that need business-critical pipelines from major SaaS sources and databases to simply work, and would rather pay a premium than staff pipeline maintenance. | Small data teams and technically capable analysts at growing companies who have a warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks) and want managed, reliable replication from SaaS tools and production databases at a predictable monthly price. |
| Setup time | A connector takes minutes to configure. Initial historical backfills can take hours to days depending on volume, and a complete warehouse foundation including modelling takes weeks. | Minutes for a first SaaS pipeline, and a day or two for production database replication with CDC, since log-based capture needs database settings, a replication user, and sometimes network tunnels. Historical loads of large tables take longer than the setup itself. |
| Learning curve | Low for the tool itself, which is much of the point. The real learning is downstream: understanding each connector's normalized schema well enough to model it correctly. | Low for creating pipelines through the interface. Moderate for the parts that decide cost and correctness: choosing ingestion modes, understanding how updates and deletes count as events, and building models or dbt projects on top. |
| Platforms | Cloud service, Hybrid and private deployment options, Terraform provider, REST API | Web application (managed cloud), AWS Marketplace, Snowflake Marketplace, REST API |
| Compliance | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS on qualifying plans | SOC 2 (all five Trust Services Criteria), HIPAA (BAA available), GDPR (DPA available), CPRA, DORA readiness |
| Founded | 2012 | 2017 |
| Headquarters | Oakland, California, United States | Bangalore, India, and San Francisco, California, United States |
| Ownership | Private, venture-backed | Venture-backed (Sequoia Capital India, Qualgro, Lachy Groom, Chiratae Ventures) |
Strengths and limitations
Fivetran
Strengths
- Reliability is genuinely the product, and it delivers: schema changes and API updates are handled without operator involvement.
- Documented, stable normalized schemas make downstream modelling predictable.
- Pre-built dbt packages for major sources save weeks of modelling on common systems.
- Log-based change data capture for databases with minimal source impact.
Limitations
- Monthly active row pricing is hard to forecast and escalates in ways that surprise buyers.
- Connector catalogue is narrower than open-source alternatives, particularly in the long tail.
- Little flexibility when a connector's normalization does not match how you want the data shaped.
- Data passes through the vendor unless a private deployment is arranged, which matters for some residency requirements.
Hevo Data
Strengths
- Published tiers with exact monthly and annual prices at each event level, from free to 100 million events, which makes the bill predictable in a category known for surprises.
- A genuinely free plan with 1 million events a month and no credit card, plus a 14-day trial.
- Log-based change data capture for the major databases, so production data can be replicated without heavy queries.
- Python, drag-and-drop, SQL, and dbt transformations in one product.
Limitations
- Inbound only: no website event collection, and reverse ETL (Activate) is closed to new customers and limited to HubSpot and Salesforce for existing ones.
- The free plan is limited to free sources, so most real pipelines begin at $299 a month.
- Event counting includes updates and deletes, so high-churn tables can burn through quota faster than row counts suggest.
- The on-demand rate for events above quota is not printed on the pricing page.
Pricing compared
Fivetran
Consumption pricing based on monthly active rows, the count of unique rows inserted, updated, or deleted in a billing month, with per-row rates declining at volume. Free tier for small usage; enterprise agreements quoted annually.
- Free$0
- Standard and EnterpriseConsumption-based, commonly from several hundred dollars
- Business CriticalQuoted
Fivetran is expensive and the case for it is straightforward arithmetic: if pipeline maintenance consumes a meaningful fraction of a data engineer's time, the subscription is cheaper than the salary, and it is far cheaper than a business decision made on stale data because a job failed silently. Where the arithmetic fails is breadth: syncing many marginal sources at high change rates produces bills disproportionate to the value of that data. The mature pattern is Fivetran for pipelines that matter and something cheaper for the rest.
Hevo Data
Tiered subscriptions metered on events, where each row inserted, updated, or deleted in the destination counts as one event. Each tier has a slider of event quotas with published monthly and annual prices; usage above the quota is charged on demand per 1,000 events.
- Free$0
- Starter$299 ($265 billed annually)
- Professional$849 ($750 billed annually)
- Business CriticalQuoted
Hevo's pricing is its argument. A small data team replicating a handful of SaaS tools and one production database can usually live inside Starter's 5 to 20 million events for $299 to $499 a month, and knows that number in advance, which is not something Fivetran's row-based or Airbyte Cloud's volume-based billing reliably offers. The security package (SOC 2 across all five criteria, HIPAA, regional processing at no extra cost) is better than the price point suggests. The catch is the floor: $299 a month is real money for a small business, and the free plan's restriction to free sources means most useful pipelines start on Starter. For a company without a warehouse, Dataddo's dashboard-first plans from about $99 are the better value.
Editorial verdict on each
Fivetran
Fivetran sells the disappearance of a problem, and it delivers on that better than anything else in the category: connectors that survive API changes, schemas that stay documented, and failures that resolve without anyone being paged. For pipelines the business depends on, that reliability is worth the premium, and the pre-built dbt packages meaningfully shorten the path from raw tables to usable models. The unavoidable objection is the meter. Monthly active rows track change rate rather than value, which makes forecasting hard and makes broad coverage of marginal sources expensive. The sensible posture is selective: put the pipelines that matter on Fivetran, put the rest somewhere cheaper, and review consumption by connector every quarter rather than at renewal.
Read the full Fivetran profileHevo Data
Hevo is the ELT tool for a small data team that wants Fivetran's managed convenience without Fivetran's billing uncertainty. It publishes every step of its pricing, free to 1 million events and $299 a month ($265 annually) for 5 million on Starter, keeps pipelines running through a quota overrun instead of dropping data, and backs that with change data capture, dbt and Python transformations, and a security package (SOC 2 across all five criteria, HIPAA, regional processing) that is stronger than the price suggests. Be clear about what it is not: it collects no website events, its reverse ETL is closed to new customers, and it writes only to warehouses and databases. A small business without a warehouse and an analyst should not start here. One that has both, and a growing list of SaaS tools to consolidate, will find few better-value ways to fill the warehouse.
Read the full Hevo Data profileFivetran profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Hevo Data last reviewed 2026-09-26. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Fivetran and Hevo Data?
Hevo is the alternative small teams reach for when Fivetran's monthly active rows make the bill hard to forecast: fixed published tiers by events, free to 1 million a month and $299 ($265 annually) for 5 million on Starter, with SOC 2 and HIPAA to match. Fivetran keeps the larger, more hardened connector catalog and the stronger reliability reputation on long-tail sources. Business-critical pipelines with budget favor Fivetran; teams that need to know next month's cost favor Hevo.
Is Fivetran or Hevo Data cheaper?
Fivetran starts at Free for up to around 500,000 monthly active rows; paid usage from roughly $500 per month at modest volumes. Hevo Data starts at $0 (Free, 1 million events a month); Starter from $299 per month, or $265 per month billed annually, for 5 million events. The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Fivetran pricing model: Consumption pricing based on monthly active rows, the count of unique rows inserted, updated, or deleted in a billing month, with per-row rates declining at volume. Free tier for small usage; enterprise agreements quoted annually. Hevo Data pricing model: Tiered subscriptions metered on events, where each row inserted, updated, or deleted in the destination counts as one event.
Does Fivetran or Hevo Data have a free plan?
Fivetran has a free plan. Around 500,000 monthly active rows across connectors. Trial terms: 14-day full-feature trial plus a permanent free tier. Hevo Data has a free plan. 1 million events a month on free sources only, up to 5 users, 1-hour scheduling, no credit card required. Trial terms: 14 days.
Who should choose Fivetran?
Data teams that need business-critical pipelines from major SaaS sources and databases to simply work, and would rather pay a premium than staff pipeline maintenance.
Who should choose Hevo Data?
Small data teams and technically capable analysts at growing companies who have a warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks) and want managed, reliable replication from SaaS tools and production databases at a predictable monthly price.
What are the best alternatives to Fivetran and Hevo Data?
SaaSTracker profiles 16 products in Customer Data Platforms. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Dataddo (Ease of Use). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
