Best Reverse ETL tools in 2023

Reverse ETL has been creating all the buzz in the data stack community in the past year. It has numerous use cases – democratizing data access, enhancing data visibility across teams, enabling optimizations of your marketing spends, personalization of your customer view, increasing synergy between multiple teams, driving ROI and so much more. Operationalizing or activating your data has become the top priority, to get an end-to-end view of your business data. To carry this out without having to write complex & error-prone code, you need a reverse ETL tool. 

The first thing you need to know about the reverse ETL platforms is that all are not created equal, with versatile functions trying to solve different business problems. There are a lot of factors to consider while choosing a reverse ETL platform – features, scalability, fault tolerance, agility, flexibility, etc. I’m sure you can think of 5 more things. How to decide which one is the best fit for your organization? 

Let’s go back to the basics first. 

What is Reverse ETL?

Reverse ETL is the last-mile bridge between data and its users. It’s essentially fetching data from a data repository, like a data warehouse or data lake and syncing it into various sales/CRM/marketing analytics tools and Saas applications that business teams use daily. This data is further used to facilitate operational efficiency, increase data visibility across multiple teams, personalize customer data, and so much more – the end result is to democratize data access in a way that helps companies grow. 

“With reverse ETL, business teams can access & act on data promptly bringing agility to business decisions.”

Data syncs via reverse ETL platforms activate your data (goes beyond BI dashboards and adds alert features for teams to take quick action) and operationalize it to deliver actionable business insights. 

Benefits of Using Reverse ETL

• Improve sales operations: Fetching data from your warehouse and sending it to CRM apps like Salesforce can boost your sales productivity, give you timely business insights and make your sales strategy more agile in ever-changing business environments.
• Complete view of customer data: Whether you want to get data related to emails in your Mailchimp or run experiments with different audiences on social media channels, reverse ETL tools can use robust algorithms to send customer data to the right places, helping you optimize marketing efforts. 
• Automate data syncs between your teams: Reverse ETL automates data synchronization between sales, marketing, product, and CS tools and helps everyone gain a broader view of your business data. Rather than data staying idle in your data warehouse or BI dashboards, you can make it available to your business teams in the tools they use everyday.
• Focus more on data analysis: Reverse ETL eliminates the need to keep reducing or removing ad-hoc data requests. This frees up vital time within data teams to do more constructive work while still retaining complete control over the data being accessed.
• Go beyond visualization: Reverse ETL platforms use data warehouses as their baseline, which means that they’re being monitored for improvements/changes all the time. So, to make things even easier, vendors use this capability to watch for errors/significant changes in data, and alert relevant stakeholders quickly.
• Identify up-selling opportunities: Using first-party data about your customers and their interaction with your product can help sales teams identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities quicker and use this to drive sales and revenue.   

Top Parameters for Comparing Reverse ETL Tools

Sync robustness

Factors within sync robustness like sync speed, data model validation capabilities, incremental syncs, etc. are some top considerations when choosing a reverse ETL platform. Your data syncs should be reliable and effortless, with minimal SQL scripting. 

Quality of data connectors

Often, connectors might not perform as well as they should, when it comes to their extensibility and ability to handle multiple syncs at scale. Your reverse ETL tool should always be able to integrate with the business tools you require today, and offer the granularity you need to deliver insights where and how you need them.

Alert mechanisms

Sometimes data syncs are bound to fail. When this happens, your reverse ETL tool should send you alerts quickly. Along with this, detailed logging and real-time debugging are some new features that are praised by end-users.

Easy actionable insights

Most business/marketing users are not used to writing fluent SQL codes to get reports from CRM or marketing automation tools. Reverse ETL tools offer no-code solutions, making it possible for users to get vital information within their business tools. This drives real-time action in everyday workflows. 

Intuitive UI

Some tools in this field do not just sync data from one place to the other, rather they focus on the user's entire experience within the platform. The main goal here should be ease of use for the end-user, helping them navigate through the tool easily. Your reverse ETL platform should be able to understand your data requirement, ask you questions in order to provide the right datasets (help of support teams/good tech documentation are also a vital factor here), and ultimately give you a clear picture of your data syncs. 

Pricing

Since data teams are making the shift from CDPs to a more inclusive, robust product, engineers carry out extensive research to find a power-packed tool that can satisfy all data requirements within the organization. Some tools, while they might have all the features we’ve talked about earlier, may provide their services or access to advanced features at a staggering cost. So naturally small and mid-sized enterprises become skeptical to invest in such a tool. A good reverse ETL tool should have 3 pricing features: a transparent pricing model, no hidden costs, and no credit card hold required during the trial period. 

Top Reverse ETL Tools in 2023

Hightouch

Hightouch is a reverse ETL tool focused for marketers, product, data and sales teams to sync data from popular warehouses into tools such as – CRMs, ERPs, email automation tools, social media platforms, etc. This tool allows you to synchronize data from sources like data warehouses, datalakes, old files, spreadsheets, etc. to a variety of tools, but one needs to have extensive SQL knowledge to use it to its full potential. While a lot of people use it to replicate data only, another popular use case of Hightouch would be B2B companies using it to sync product usage data into Salesforce. 

Verdict: Can add value to your data stack but is costly. May not provide a complete solution to all use cases.

Rating on G2: 4.6/5

Census

It’s one of the latest tools out there to fetch your data from a warehouse and send it to various business applications such as Marketo, Salesforce, HubSpot, etc. With A-tier clients like Figma, Notion, and Clearbit, this platform often clubs with forward ETL provider Fivetran to build better business operations. With the feature to leverage live metrics in every application, GetCensus is widely used to personalize marketing, improve sales productivity, and reduce support times. However, their free plan only supports only  1 data source and 1 user access. One small drawback their users have talked about is a lack of visibility into error logs, making it hard to find the issues that exactly happened. 

Verdict: Rigid & expensive pricing plan, scope for better customer support.

Rating on G2: 4.5/5

Hevo Activate

Hevo Activate is also trying to gather steam in the Reverse ETL space. The platform is simple and easy to use but presently supports very few destinations for reverse ETL. Some users have confessed that the UI is sometimes not as intuitive as other tools, and maintaining code or debugging code can be challenging. With the ability to run fast transformations while running data syncs, sometimes users are unable to apply new transformation rules retroactively. 

Verdict: Competitive pricing but with restricted features few destinations. 

Rating on G2: 4.4/5

Integrate.io

Ranked #3 on the list of the easiest-to-use Reverse ETL platforms, Integrate is a versatile platform offering seamless data synchronization between tools and data warehouses, along with offering automated ETL/ELT & CDC, API Management, and Data Warehouse Monitoring. A flexible open cloud platform, Integrate is known to be a Rest API connector, enabling end users to pull in data from any source that has a Rest API. Recently some users have talked about how they have to start everything from scratch (while building a pipeline), when they could have a feature of copy-pasting some components. In addition, several data engineers have discussed getting access to job error logs, and how it would be helpful for debugging. 

Verdict: Difficult to navigate through, UI could be more intuitive. 

G2 Rating: 4.3/5

DataChannel 

As one of the very few data integration platforms that give you access to both ETL & reverse ETL capabilities, DataChannel is designed to provide you a seamless data management experience. It has unmatched on-boarding experience and reliable syncs. The platform has robust data synchronization capabilities – fetching information from data warehouses like Snowflake, Redshift, MySQL, and Google Bigquery – to sending it to tools like Facebook Ads, Snapchat Ads Audiences, TikTok Ads Audiences, Google Cloud Storage, Slack, and almost all major SaaS platforms. It has in-built support for previewing data without leaving the platform. Also known for its best-in-class support and onboarding services, it is priced competitively with a transparent pay-as-you-go model and offers a forever-free tier. Most users have talked about the platform’s capacity to run incremental uploads on datasets and a default auto-mapping feature. Any unsuccessful runs are handled with real-time alerts to quickly resolve issues and error logs. 

Verdict: Robust integrated platform offering value for your money

G2 Rating: 4.6/5

DataChannel – An integrated ETL & Reverse ETL solution

• 100+ Data Sources. DataChannel’s ever-expanding list of supported data sources includes all popular advertising, marketing, CRM, financial, and eCommerce platforms and apps along with support for ad-hoc files, google sheets, cloud storages, relational databases, and ingestion of real-time data using webhooks. If we do not have the integration you need, reach out to our team and we will build it for you for free.
• Powerful scheduling and orchestration features with granular control over scheduling down to the exact minute.
• Granular control over what data to move. Unlike most tools which are highly opinionated and dictate what data they would move, we allow you the ability to choose down to field level what data you need. If you need to add another dimension or metric down the line, our easy-to-use UI lets you do that in a single click without any breaking changes to your downstream process.
• Extensive Logging, fault tolerance, and automated recovery allow for dependable and reliable pipelines. If we are unable to recover, the extensive notifications will alert you via slack, app and email for taking appropriate action.
• Built to scale at an affordable cost. Our best-in-class platform is built with all ETL best practices built to handle billions of rows of data and will scale with your business when you need them to, while allowing you to only pay for what you use today.
• Get started in minutes. Get started in minutes with our self-serve UI or with the help of our on-boarding experts who can guide you through the process. We provide extensive documentation support and content to guide you all the way.
• Managed Data Warehouse. While cloud data warehouses offer immense flexibility and opportunity, managing them can be a hassle without the right team and resources. If you do not want the trouble of managing them in-house, use our managed warehouse offering and get started today. Whenever you feel you are ready to do it in-house, simply configure your own warehouse and direct pipelines to it.
• Activate your data with Reverse ETL. Be future-ready and don’t let your data sit idle in the data warehouse or stay limited to your BI dashboards. The unidimensional approach toward data management is now undergoing a paradigm change. Instead, use DataChannel’s reverse ETL offering to send data to the tools your business teams use every day. Set up alerts & notifications on top of your data warehouse and sync customer data across all platforms converting your data warehouse into a powerful CDP (Customer Data Platform). You can even preview the data without ever leaving the platform.

Get Started Today 

Explore the capabilities of reverse ETL with DataChannel. Drop us a message here to talk to our support team or use our 14 day free trial and give it a try today.

‍