Estuary Flow Monthly

What do you like best about the product?

For initial and basic setup, Estuary offers a fast and cost-effective way to integrate major data sources. I was able to connect my MongoDB to Snowflake for analytics purposes within just a few hours, which is something I haven't seen any other tool accomplish. I switched from Fivetran to Estuary to achieve lower latency and to significantly reduce my expenses for both Fivetran and Snowflake.

After more than a year, I am using more data sources and destinations on daily basis. In this period, error messages in the UI have become more helpful (yet still are not perfect) when debugging connections to a new data source.

The founder, David, is very hands-on and has been extremely helpful, taking the time to explain configuration quirks and respond to feature requests on several occasions. The Slack channel serves as the main and efficient way to get support.

What do you dislike about the product?

Setting up the tool does demand a certain amount of data engineering work. While this is likely true for any platform aimed at achieving a solid level of data governance, I found the process of de-nesting JSON using slashes in variable names, as well as removing or renaming variables via the CLI, to be conceptually challenging-especially during my migration from Fivetran.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Lowering data replication latency and warehousing costs in Snowflake without need to write any connectors at my core application level.

What do you like best about the product?

Easy to setup. Pricing for starter not scary like Fivetran. Great support in slack.

What do you dislike about the product?

- Hope their can be more connectors. Like databricks to postgres
- Backfill is a bit slow (take 3-4 days to backfill a 500GiB table)

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Data replication from live database to analytic/data warehouse

What do you like best about the product?

Ease of use. even though i didn't really have much experience with data pipelines i was able to get things running and have not had any major issues. Easy to use, Also i hardly ever have to come in and adjust things

What do you dislike about the product?

Pretty happy with what the product is. But if the guys do read this i would love some consistently updated "how to" video content from the team . I feel like theres so much more i could be doing but since i usually struggle to find any online content i let things be . Even if they had some course available because i believe that the beauty of this product is that it has a low barrier to entry which means lots of non-data people will use it . So will be great to have some quality training material

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Data pipelines. Work at what was initially a sort of start up . So our data team was like 2 people. We needed to pull in lots of data from 3rd party services but didn't have the man power to build and maintain so many pipelines , thus estuary was a huge win as it allowed us to keep the team lean but the operations flowing.

What do you like best about the product?

The biggest thing for me is that I can set up a replication job pretty quickly and not have to rebuild it every time something upstream changes. Lots of tools break when schemas drift, or when the source throws something weird, but Estuary handles most of that better than I expected, relative to other tools I've used for the same task before. I mainly use it to move operational data into my warehouse and it saves time since I don’t have to write the ingestion logic myself. The UI is simple enough that I don’t get lost trying to remember where things are.

What do you dislike about the product?

When something does fail, I don’t always get enough detail or logs to actually understand what's happening. I end up guessing until I narrow it down. The logs feel a little too abstracted for me, who wants more visibility into what the connector is doing. Also, some connectors feel more stable than others, so I’ve had a few situations where I had to restart a job for no clear reason. It works great, but as with anything, it’s not perfect, and sometimes the troubleshooting takes longer than I'd like.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It mostly saves me from writing and maintaining my own replication pipelines. I use it for moving data from a few operational systems into my warehouse so I can analyze it and surface it to the business. Before this, I had a mix of custom scripts, some batch ingestion tools, other real-time streaming tools, and the mix and mashing and context switching was frustrating to keep up with, especially when communicating these inconsistencies to downstream business users. Estuary isn’t perfect, but it cuts down the amount of code I have to maintain and consolidates everything into one tool for ingestion. It keeps things running well enough that I can focus on other parts of the data stack.

What do you like best about the product?

Implementing and using this platform has been very straightforward. The step-by-step guides make it easy to set up new sources and destinations. We began with only a few sources and destinations, but as our company grow, so did our reliance on Estuary. Estuary was able to scale to match our company growth.

Our sources and destinations are continuously updated, and Estuary consistently keeps our data freshness within 15 to 30 minutes of the source. The platform has proven to be highly stable. Rarely there is an outage, but when there is it is resolved promptly.

The range of sources and destinations options Estuary provides is impressive, and they are continually adding more.

On several occasions, we encountered issues importing data from our primary vendor's database, always due to the vendor updating their tables in a non-standard way. The Estuary support team found a solution to ensure our data was replicated correctly every time.

I cannot say enough positive things about their support. They are always willing to tackle the problem and come up with a solution.

What do you dislike about the product?

The only downside I've encountered is when a new option is introduced, its default sometimes doesn't match behavior before the option was added. While not causing issues with the existing tables, it did cause an issue when adding a new table to an existing replication. Even though the new table was added the same as the others, the data wouldn't replicate as it did with the other tables.

Fortunately, the support team was always able to clarify what had happened and guide me on how to adjust the new option to fit our needs.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our main vendor does not update some of their database tables in a standard way, which leads to difficulty accurately replicating the data from those tables. When this happens, we reach out to our vendor to understand their update methods. Then contact Estuary support to describe what the vendor is doing and how it affects the replicated data. Each time, Estuary has managed to develop a workaround for the issue caused by the vendor and able to accurately replicate the data on our side. Even when it required custom coding by Estuary specifically for our situation.