Used For

• +**Your Airflow pipelines fail every time Salesforce updates their schema** → Fivetran auto-handles changes, no more 3am debugging sessions
• +**You're manually copying data between Salesforce, Zendesk, and Google Analytics for weekly reports** → Automated syncs every hour, get your 15 hours back
• +**Your marketing team wants attribution reports but data lives in 8 different places** → Everything flows into one warehouse, self-serve dashboards finally possible
• +Handles 300+ connectors out of the box - no custom API work for standard SaaS tools
• +Change data capture tracks database updates in batches without breaking your production systems

Best For

• >Your custom data pipelines break every weekend and wake you up with alerts
• >You're manually exporting CSVs from 12 different tools for 15 hours every week
• >Hit 50+ employees and your duct-taped Zapier automations can't handle the volume

Not For

• -Solo founders or teams under 10 people — minimal free tier and row-based pricing hits $500/month fast on basic usage
• -Anyone needing real-time data — batches run every 5-60 minutes, so you'll miss urgent alerts
• -Teams with lots of custom APIs or file imports — built for standard SaaS tools, not weird proprietary systems

Pairs With

• *Snowflake (where all your raw data lands before you can actually use it for anything)
• *dbt (to clean and transform the messy data Fivetran dumps into your warehouse)
• *Tableau (to build the dashboards that justify paying $5K/month for automated data movement)
• *Salesforce (the source of most of your expensive row usage because it's huge and changes constantly)
• *BigQuery (Google's data warehouse option if you're not on Snowflake)
• *Looker (for the pretty reports that make executives happy about data spending)
• *PagerDuty (because even automated pipelines break and someone needs to get woken up)

The Catch

• !Pricing explodes fast — users report bills jumping from $2K to $8K/month after adding one connector due to schema changes
• !You'll still need dbt or similar for transformations since Fivetran just moves raw data around
• !Initial historical syncs eat massive row quotas (like 500M rows on Day 1) and blow through your monthly limits immediately

Bottom Line

Plug-and-play data pipelines that actually work, but you'll pay enterprise prices even as a startup.