Fivetran has room for improvement in data pipeline observability. The Fivetran logs are fairly basic, compared to, for example, the insight Fivetran gives into helping users understanding the performance of data pipelines. So I think their observability into the pipeline itself could be improved.

In addition, Fivetran is in the very early stages of allowing other companies to access its metadata API, but that's something that could use improvement, and I know that they're working on right now.

We use a separate tool for "reverse ETL", which is the opposite of what Fivetran does; it pushes data from your data warehouse back out to business applications. If Fivetran pulls data from those same applications, they should also enable users to push it back. I would love to do both ETL and reverse ETL in the same tool. It would be nice if Fivetran offered both their regular offering plus the reverse ETL option as well.

More connectors are needed for exotic, popular, and rising star portals. Creating a comprehensive, one-stop shop for bringing data as quickly as possible would improve the solution. If I check a list of data sources, only 10% of new providers are supported by the solution. Most companies want various data sources for processing down the road. We use the solution as a primary source so we have to decide if it will work for a use case or if we will need to create a custom integration.

Customer support should be offered via a portal system instead of the current chat platform. In a portal system, it is fairly easy to look back and see the history of your discussion. With a chat platform, once you close a session you have to open a new one. The history is lost and you don't have a record of who you communicated with to receive that advice. For example, I might chat with support today about an issue that recurs tomorrow. My colleague catches up with me to continue work on the issue but I can't share the chat history for further discussion. Chat platforms are not a collaborative tool. A portal system is an elegant way to ensure two-way communication. 

The solution is very expensive. I would like to have a better integration of the solution with Azure.

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. 

The CI/CD capabilities aren't user-friendly. It's easy for simple tasks, but sometimes I get error codes that aren't well-defined in the system or the documentation. 

We also experience some lag when migrating between two database sources. Data transformation is expensive, so it's segregated across multiple accounts. It would be helpful if we could unify those into a single transformation component or integrate the solution with other transformation tools. It was built for data replication, not transformation. 

Fivetran should add more connectors because its competitors, like Airbyte, have more connectors. All of these systems have a problem, namely that they are pure cloud player solutions. I often work in hybrid solutions where customers have on-prem things mixed with cloud things.

Pure cloud player solutions never provide a good solution for what is on-prem, which leads to a gap. When you look at systems such as ActiveBatch, they have a very, very strong on-prem platform. They are also looking at the web and cloud things, but they are not that good at the cloud things. So there is nothing that is equally good for both on-prem and cloud.

Fivetran should add a feature to connect to the SQL server on-prem.

There was a random change to our contract in a unilateral manner after the first year. The overall cost of using Fivetran was then unclear and this is the reason I would not recommend this solution. 

One of the main selling points during the first implementation was the ability to carry over credits from one year to the next. This option was later removed and impacted their credibility as a service provider. 

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.

It should have a few more monitoring functionalities. It should also support integration with more data sources. Currently, it supports Snowflake, AWS, and Google Cloud, but it can also support SAP integration. They can make it more flexible.

The documentation can be laid out better to make it easier to find things, and I really wish there was built-in support for changing passwords.

Some features don't work as advertised for the platform/repository database, and HVR is not always the fastest at getting results.

Fivetran has a lot of connectors and can currently connect to more than 200 sources. However, occasionally we come across a source that Fivetran does not currently connect to. We can request them to make a connector, but this can take some time. In the meantime, if we want to read through that API or add a custom connection, we cannot do it on Fivetran itself. We must use AWS Lambda and integrate it with our Fivetran account, and this must be done through the public cloud. The number of connectors has room for improvement.

I would like Fivetran to implement additional resource monitoring and restriction policies. I don't want to spend more than 100 or 1000 credits per week or have restrictions based on data sources. If a data source suddenly produces a large amount of data, I could manually pause the credits, but it would be very helpful if I could set policies like this.

One of the traditional issues with the platform has been logging. The logging, while they have it, is not particularly verbose, so when there are issues it becomes hard to do. They also have internal logs versus customer-facing logs. We've asked FiveTran to provide more exposure on that or to be able to subscribe to it via an API or Datadog or something like that to pull from their system. 

Another thing is mainly their breadth of being able to pull from different systems. They have some of this already, but they're pushing to do some integrations with Excel online. 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.

The connections with SAP must be improved. The environment has some limitations.

The connectors from some websites are not available. It is hard to get the data and work on it. The product should expose the APIs in a better way. The cloud functions are very code-centric. A low-code tool or a no-code tool would give us more flexibility. The environment must be more development-friendly.

Given that Fivetran is a fully managed third-party solution, the customization could improve because Fivetran gives more thought to people who don't want to manage analytics workflows rather than engineers who want to be able to customize pipelines more thoroughly.

We experience cost issues because Fivetran is charged on a usage basis. When you reach a certain level, the tool should focus on reducing the costs. The solution is expensive when you are moving gigabytes and petabytes of data. 

It should also focus more on REST APIs and webhooks. 

Fivetran would be improved by adding the ability to integrate the data from third-party APIs. Its logs could also be more informative, and its real-time streaming data processing speed could be faster.

In the next release, I'd like to see an automated version of HVR with a script that can be run on a management server where we can provide all the information within the script, or the script can prompt the user to enter the storage area and volume details so that with just a few clicks, the solution will be deployed automatically in the background.

We have a number of connections to heterogeneous databases and that could be expanded on. One of the databases is an additional database that should be coming online but there is some difficulty with it. Other than this, in comparison to other products it's competing with, including Oracle, it beats them hands down for everything, including the price.

I would like for them to incorporate additional transformations. A valuable aspect of the product is that it does inflight transformations and that could be expanded. 

The interface needs to be more user-friendly.

Data security should be improved in the next release.