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Census vs Fivetran comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Census
Ranking in Data Integration
43rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Fivetran
Ranking in Data Integration
14th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Data Replication (3rd), Cloud Data Integration (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Census is 0.4%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fivetran is 1.9%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Fivetran1.9%
Census0.4%
Other97.7%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2784462 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Data activation has become faster and business teams access consistent customer insights
Census has been very useful to us as a reverse ETL layer. We have reduced engineering efforts, which has translated into tens of thousands of euros per year in avoided development and maintenance costs, faster and more accurate customer activation, and other improvements that we achieved using Census. Census is faster than our previous approach. Census has enabled faster activation of analytic data into CRM and marketing platforms in our case. Another key benefit is the elimination of manual exports and custom integration scripts, consistent customer data across analytical and operational systems. The best feature that Census offers is that it works directly on top of the data warehouse, preserving a single source of truth. Another valuable feature is that Census provides excellent support for CRM, marketing, and customer-facing platforms. Census creates a single source of truth by making the data warehouse the only place where business logic and data definition live and by ensuring that all downstream operational systems are consumers, not owners of data. All customer attributes, metrics, and segments are defined once, directly in the data warehouse, using SQL and existing data models. Census was useful for us because of the fast time to value, as new syncs can be configured and deployed quickly without custom development. It also ensures that data models are clean and well-defined in the data warehouse after we start using Census. Based on delivery metrics and team feedback, the benefit is that the time to activate new use cases was reduced from weeks to days. Engineering effort dedicated to reverse ETL pipelines decreased by sixty to seventy percent. Maintenance overhead for custom integration was almost completely eliminated, and marketing and growth teams accelerated experimentation cycles significantly. From a cost perspective, reduced engineering effort translated into tens of thousands of euros per year in avoided development and maintenance costs, and faster and more accurate customer activation improved campaign effectiveness and business responsiveness.
Hafiz Usman - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead Data Engineer at Data Pilot
Has accelerated data integration workflows and supports seamless development of custom connectors
I've worked extensively with Fivetran, mainly used for extraction purposes, and I've worked with the transformation element in it as well. Fivetran not only has built-in connectors but also provides SDK connectors, allowing us to develop our own connectors in an easy manner. I don't have to write raw Python scripts or dumping scripts; it offers straightforward examples and guidelines, making it much simpler to develop custom connectors inside Fivetran. We've been able to develop many custom connectors as well, which is unique and beneficial for having everything centralized instead of having those connectors located elsewhere. One of the best features by Fivetran is its clean, simple, and intuitive UI. It includes a transformation section where I can deploy my DBT queries and scripts. It also supplies good tracking capabilities for billing estimates and user permissions, allowing for customization to the desired level. The number of connectors it has remains a standout feature, and within connectors, the options available are very helpful. Although it sometimes appears static due to its built-in nature, it offers good flexibility for data transformation and caching, which I appreciate because it saves us extensive script-writing time.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Based on delivery metrics and team feedback, the benefit is that the time to activate new use cases was reduced from weeks to days, engineering effort dedicated to reverse ETL pipelines decreased by sixty to seventy percent, maintenance overhead for custom integration was almost completely eliminated, and marketing and growth teams accelerated experimentation cycles significantly."
"The portal is very intuitive and easy to use."
"Fivetran's most valuable feature is replication."
"The general data ingestion is valuable. It's used for a lot of data. It provides about 90% of the data we use in our data warehouse without needing data engineering."
"Making the decision to implement Fivetran was supported by the fact that they have better connectors than other competitors."
"The user interface is mostly UI-based, eliminating the need for a lot of coding."
"You can manage all of your connectors individually, which gives you a very good ability to trace which one of your ETL processes is running and when."
"The most valuable feature of Fivetran is that it only synchronizes what needs to be synchronized."
"The ease of setting up the connectors and transformations is highly valuable."
 

Cons

"The areas for improvement are complex transformation logic because it must still be handled upstream in the warehouse, and cost predictability requires attention at high data volumes."
"The documentation is decent, but it's hard to find information online about Fivetran. For example, if you try to search for an error code, you won't find much information about it in forums."
"Fivetran is very expensive for data sources with a lot of rows, such as email data. I would like to see cheaper pricing for data sources like that."
"The environment must be more development-friendly."
"The experience of using SDK connectors can be improved, as it lacks computational power, which is an area that needs enhancement."
"Fivetran would be improved by adding the ability to integrate the data from third-party APIs."
"If Fivetran can build in more transformations, that would be really helpful in my opinion."
"This solution needs to improve its real-time data and transformation availability."
"Some of the pain points we're looking at are trying to integrate some of the items in the Microsoft stack, so SharePoint and Excel, and then some of the newer Azure services."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The licensing costs are extremely high for the usage of somebody who has one GB or two GB of usage per day for real-time traffic. There are many other players in the market which are similarly priced or competitively priced. On average per month, it used to come around 12,000-15,000 USD, which is very high."
"In the first year, we were given a very good discount. It was approximately 20,000 Euros per year. In the third year, we purchased credit for two years and the price was 33,000 Euros per year."
"I've heard that the license for HVR is a bit costly compared to its competitors, but since it's reliable and efficient, I think the customer shouldn't be bothered about the cost."
"The product is reasonably expensive"
"The pricing model is okay and mid to large companies will not have an issue with it."
"I can't give exact amounts because that's based on usage, but it's more expensive than some of its competitors."
"Fivetran is very expensive, and its database-driven pricing model is outdated."
"I would say they're a little bit on the expensive side, and their contract process is not particularly good, but there is a lot of potential flexibility."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
12%
Healthcare Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Census?
Census has been performing very well overall. One area that may need improvement is that sometimes a custom setup is very difficult to configure. This was the case with our Intercom segment setup. ...
What is your primary use case for Census?
Census is a versatile data synchronizing solution that solves a wide range of data management problems for our business. With Census, we were able to reduce the sync time taken to transfer data fro...
What advice do you have for others considering Census?
I would rate Census an eight out of ten according to my experience. I feel it is not quite a ten because sometimes a custom setup is very difficult to configure. This was the case with our Intercom...
What's the deal with the HVR software acquisition?
As a user of HVR Software I followed this deal closely. Fivetran is apparently trying to establish more in its sector and by buying an already established data replication software, they become som...
Does HVR Software provide reliable insights?
I honestly can't think of another data replication software that can give you better statistics and insight than HVR Software. There's the feature for topology and statistics and both of them can ...
How much traffic can HVR Software handle?
As someone who works at a company where a high volume of information is replicated and has tried several data replication softwares, I can tell you that you're looking at the right one. HVR Softwar...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Autodesk, Condé Nast, JetBlue, Morgan Stanley, OpenAI, LVMH, Pfizer, Verizon, SpotifyNational Australia Bank, Saks, Cemex, Okta, Dropbox, Pitney Bowes, World Fuel Services,Lufthansa, AutoZone, ASICS, ASOS, Coupa, Databricks, Hermes, New Relic, Intercom,Canva, Honeywell, Square, DocuSign, Nandos, Oldcastle Infrastructure
Find out what your peers are saying about Informatica, Microsoft, Palantir and others in Data Integration. Updated: July 2026.
908,344 professionals have used our research since 2012.