Moved to Fivetran after connector bugs and tedious Airbyte operations → Fivetran
“operating Airbyte was extremely tedious, even primetime connectors had bugs that I personally had to fix”
Airbyte alternatives: where its users went, and why they left
Airbyte (airbyte.com) has 23 sourced reports on Friction, drawn from 71 public source threads (as of 2026-10-15), 4 of them describing a move away. This page reads them for one question: if you are leaving Airbyte, what do its users say they moved to, and what pushed them out?
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Where Airbyte users say they went
Switching reports that name a destination. A count is the number of reports naming it, not a market share: Friction only holds what people say in public.
| Named alternative | Reports naming it | Newest report |
|---|---|---|
| Fivetran | 2 | 2022 |
| A self-built or in-house tool | 1 | 2024 |
| Meltano | 1 | 2022 |
In their words
Airbyte connectors skipped for lacking incremental updates and permissions → in-house connectors
“they don't support the full flexibility that we need, including pulling incremental updates and access permissions”
Early Airbyte product was good but too expensive for the team
“although too expensive for our needs in the end”
What pushes people away from Airbyte
The most-reported open problems, worst severity first. Each links to the item with its source.
abctl deployment of v1.6.0 never completes on a fresh GCE instance · Setup & onboarding · Blocks work · 2 people
“create a brand new GCE instance with airbyte using abctl and the deployement is unable to complete”
Pinterest breakdown reports omit identifying columns · Reporting & analytics · Blocks work
“Records therefore arrive at the breakdown grain with no way to tell which targeting value, product or keyword a row belongs to”
Shopify transactions with older created_at values are filtered out · Reliability & bugs · Blocks work
“A transaction that first becomes visible to the BULK query after the saved state has already moved past its `created_at` is therefore dropped”
Self-hosted Greenhouse connector cannot use client-credentials OAuth · Integrations · Blocks work
“self-hosted users hold a credential type the connector cannot accept and cannot obtain the credential type it requires”
Shopify countries stream marks GraphQL error pages as complete · Reliability & bugs · Blocks work
“the sync completes successfully with a partial (or empty) snapshot, and a full refresh / overwrite destination replaces the previous complete table with it”
Other data pipelines tools on Friction, and what their users struggle with
Switching trades one set of problems for another. The same evidence, for each tool Friction covers in this category:
Prefect
30 reports · 72 source threads · most-discussed area: Reliability & bugs
Counts and reports reflect people who post in public (developers and technical buyers are over-represented). A tool with fewer reports is not a better tool; it may only be discussed less. How the data is built.