--- title: dbt Reviews meta_title: 'dbt Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 209 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how dbt works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.7 review_count: 209 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-17' parent_category: name: IT Infrastructure url: https://www.g2.com/categories/it-infrastructure --- # dbt Reviews **Vendor:** dbt Labs **Category:** [DataOps Platforms](https://www.g2.com/categories/dataops-platforms) **Average Rating:** 4.7/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 209 ## About dbt dbt is a transformation workflow that lets data teams quickly and collaboratively deploy analytics code following software engineering best practices like modularity, portability, CI/CD, and documentation. Now anyone who knows SQL can build production-grade data pipelines. ## dbt Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users love the **ease of use** of dbt, thanks to its clear structure, intuitive documentation, and seamless integration. (34 reviews) - Users value dbt for its **integration of software engineering best practices** , enhancing maintainability and collaboration in SQL transformations. (21 reviews) - Users value the **automation** features of dbt, significantly enhancing SQL code maintainability and transforming data workflows. (17 reviews) - Users value the **transformative power** of dbt, efficiently organizing and modeling data for actionable insights. (16 reviews) - Users value dbt for its **high data quality** , ensuring integrity and enhancing analytics workflows through modularization and documentation. (14 reviews) - Productivity Improvement (14 reviews) - Solution Efficiency (13 reviews) - Analytics (12 reviews) - Efficiency Improvement (12 reviews) - Users value the **seamless integrations** of dbt with various platforms, enhancing their modeling and transformation processes. (12 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users face challenges with **limited functionality** in dbt due to rigid models and debugging difficulties, affecting project progress. (13 reviews) - Users often face **dependency issues** with dbt, leading to time-consuming troubleshooting and disruption in workflows. (12 reviews) - Users find the **steep learning curve** of mastering concepts like Jinja and Git to be quite challenging. (10 reviews) - Users struggle with **unhelpful error messages** in dbt, making troubleshooting difficult and frustrating. (9 reviews) - Users face **confusing error reporting** that complicates troubleshooting and hinders quick identification of issues. (9 reviews) - Users find the **complex setup** of dbt challenging, especially with confusing error messages and a steep learning curve. (8 reviews) - Debugging Issues (8 reviews) - Users find the **learning curve quite challenging** , particularly with advanced features and debugging complexities in dbt. (8 reviews) - Query Issues (8 reviews) - Technical Issues (8 reviews) ## dbt Reviews ### 1. DBT Wow! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jenna B. | Analytics Engineering Tech Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** I love how powerful dbt is. I use it on a daily basis for all my ELT needs! It is compact and efficient. **What do you dislike about dbt?** I don't have much to say about what I dislike about dbt.. nothing! **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** DBT solves many issues for us, including documentation, DAGs, relationship testing, data integrity constraints, performance, etc. ### 2. Invaluable tool that fosters a culture of transparency **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sneha R. | Director of Analytics, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Dbt frees me up to understand data logic without asking the data engineers, thus unblocking me to move faster and make better decisions **What do you dislike about dbt?** Sometimes the error messages are not easy to understand and require some assistance, but this is rare **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Dbt makes it easier for all members of a data team to understand logic, upstream/downstream dependencies, increase the quality of critical data, and uplevels the data IQ of an entire company. By ensuring that our data is logical and well-tested, we free up our time to do less debugging and more analysis. ### 3. Great transformation tool!!! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Games | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** I like a lot the fact that is so easy the initial setup and the fact that a lot of the features are available on the free pricing options. The documentation available about dbt is great also. **What do you dislike about dbt?** Not all databases can be set up on the browser-based IDE, and you need to set it up locally. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** You can reuse many code when you refactor a model using dbt. The documentation is another excellent feature that helps a lot to understand the layers of the models and the different fields. ### 4. I <3 dbt **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Josiah M. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2023 **What do you like best about dbt?** The core product has completely changed the way I think about and build data pipelines. It's hard for me to imagine the analytics world without dbt. **What do you dislike about dbt?** The metrics layer still need to do some maturing. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** dbt helps you convert you raw data into data tables that humans can understand and use. ### 5. DBT is the BEST (and most fun?) transformation tool. Mind blowing. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Skyler Y. | Software Engineer., Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 18, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** The whole paradigm of representing data models as SELECT statements is so approachable and functional. Starting out as a SQL novice, I was able to model complex database schemas into a common data standard. Documentation was good, and support was helpful. DBT Cloud is an ideal environment for learning DBT in real-time. Most of all, I love that everything is version-controlled and easy to roll back. DBT is one of the most innovative tools I've encountered period. **What do you dislike about dbt?** Honestly, I can't think of anything significant. The online IDE has some bugs (as all do), but after the initial learning curve, we switched to VSC and GitHub, so problem solved. Documentation for Jinja _as it relates specifically to DBT_ was a little difficult to parse, and there were fewer articles about that online. If you already know Jinja this won't be an issue, but starting cold that was the steepest part of the learning curve by far. **Recommendations to others considering dbt:** The paradigm of "every model is a SELECT statement" may not be the correct fit for every situation. Understanding how to use joins, sub-queries, and window functions is necessary for advanced transformations. DBT's own examples provide great reference asn best practices for most these concepts. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use DBT for radical transformations of many source schemas into a common standard. We pair it with Fivetran to create an end-to-end data loading and transformation solution. It's been a quantum leap in scalability compared to our own, custom solutions as used previously. ### 6. dbt is easy dynamic sql on steroids **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Judy C. | Data Architect, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 13, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** easy to learn, very dynamic and powerful. dbt allows teams to work together using skills they already know (sql) along with a powerful templating language. this allows you do develop dynamic sql in a very easy, maintainable fashion. Using text files, it also allows you to easily see what's changed and who made those changes via github integration. It also eliminates the tedious ddl creation, and allows you to switch between using views and tables with a single configuration argument. It has powerful testing capabilities built in. **What do you dislike about dbt?** compiling sometimes when not needed - it can slow down your development if you're saving a lot of files at once. Usually performance is not a problem but in some cases (not the typical workflow) it can be slow. **Recommendations to others considering dbt:** dbt is great for transformation - you still need another tool like FiveTran or Stitch to get the data into your warehouse. It's very powerful, and the dbt tools and support are great. Onboarding is quick as there are many developers who know sql. Being familiar with python is an additional bonus to becoming productive rapidly, but not required. One thing I really like is that dbt is open-source, so you can keep your business logic transformations even if you decide not to use dbt cloud. In most other etl tools, if they hike the rates you are stuck using their product or re-writing everything from scratch. dbt core offers a good alternative under those circumstances. However, the company provides good value for its services so I'm happy to stay with them. With a prior GUI-based tool it was impossible to easily see what had changed, and merge with other developers. This is built for teamwork and accountability. There are also out-of-the-box tools and libraries that can help you test and maintain data quality with no coding required. The online dbt documentation is very good. In addition to regular support, they have slack channels and are very responsive. The online training and personalized rapid onboarding training was excellent too. Using dbt we were able to set up a Snowflake data warehouse and bring in 21 different sources, servicing hundreds of reports, in 8 months with a team of 2-3 data engineers and 3 BI engineers. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** solving data transformations. dbt lets you create dynamic sql very easily. you can onboard new teammates easily as everyone knows sql. transformations are stored in plain text in github so you can easily identify what's changed. easy to use - you only write 'select' statements - dbt handles all the ddl for you dynamically, keeping target environments separate. Integrated documentation and testing. packages (libraries) are available with great utilities. ### 7. dbt review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David S. | Principal Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Highly functional SQL transformational tool. Simple to start, but with adequate levels of complexity available to add if necessary. Good documentation. **What do you dislike about dbt?** Nothing comes to mind as the product provides a great solution **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Internal data transformation in a cloud warehouse. Very few other products accomplish this as well. ### 8. Gamechanger **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Templating SQL, enabling aspects of data engineering to be treated more like software engineering. CI/CD pipelines. Autogenerated lineage and documentation. Git intergration. **What do you dislike about dbt?** I think dbt should be more opinionated on best practices around staging/intermediate/marts and the vocabulary used. Would also like to see further niche coverage (snowflake streams). **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** SQL Model lineage and versioning. It makes it much more clearer the upstream sources and downstream impacts of changing any SQL model. Integrated version control and deployment environments also makes rollbacks and testing much easier. ### 9. DBT enabled us to focus on added value of data **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** - Easy to use UI - Lineage - Enforced methodology that is scalable - Data quality tests - Scheduling & automations - AAA documentation - community support **What do you dislike about dbt?** - Settings are not always super clear - Convenient features of Dataform that are missing: run assertions (tests) within the model - no recommendations for CLI commands **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** - Orchestrating & scheduling transformations (gain of time and reliability) - Data quality tests (gain in reliability) - Re-use of models (gain in time and consistency) ### 10. Speed, Power, Control at low cost **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paolo P. | Business Intelligence Project Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 01, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** the best achievements we reach with DBT is the time reductiong in ETL process . **What do you dislike about dbt?** if you have to manage complex process you need to create a big number of models **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** ETL time duration has been reduced and also our DWH cost decrease with this redcution ### 11. Changed my work life! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David T. | Senior fault data analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 01, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** It basically turns SQL into a dev environment and forces you to productionise your code using good practices. It makes repo control super simple and allows SQL analysts to create data products and pipelines. **What do you dislike about dbt?** Some quality of life improvements could be made to the GUI but apart from that it's great! **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** It allows data analysts to create full on data products, integrating wit Git and making the whole flow easy. It's also in cloud so it's super easy to use and set up. ### 12. Newbie to dbt **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Scott G. | BI Team Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Easy to set up SQL based UI is intuitive **What do you dislike about dbt?** Lack of logs/metadata on job runs, the area around that isn't strong **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are able to model our data for Looker outside of looker, so no need for PDTs etc ### 13. dbt is a must for every organization **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tyler H. | Analytics Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 12, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** The upsides of dbt is that it makes it easy to implement software engineering best practices like versional control, modular & DRY code to your data team. **What do you dislike about dbt?** I have found that the cloud IDE can be buggy at times. Hopefully with the updated IDE releasing soon this will improve the user experience. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am making core fact and dimensions tables that will be driving several reports and dashboards for organiziaton. Dbt allows me to be more productive and scale easier. ### 14. DBT for data transformations **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mir H. | Director, Data Architecture, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 19, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** DBT offers a centralized repository for all our data transformations and works best with snowflake. DBT has helped us with superior automated testing, and easier CICD and the Teams version is so affordable to get started with dbtcloud everything on cloud. **What do you dislike about dbt?** Compared to the Teams version, the enterprise version offers better features and on-board training but is at least 5x expensive. Rapid on-board training comes only with the enterprise version, wish it was open for everyone. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** DBT is very easy to use for both data engineers and analysts. It has offered better collaboration within and outside our data team, and consolidated testing, and documentation with DAG/documentation generator. ### 15. Streamlines SQL Development **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 09, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** After years of working with cumbersome ETL flows, dbt's modular approach makes it simple to change only a small portion of a large process without breaking anything. Having version control with SQL is a game changer. **What do you dislike about dbt?** There is a learning curve to working with dbt, like any new solution/process, but the upside is worth it. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** dbt's approach to making SQL code clean and DRY has greatly improved our workflow and code. ### 16. Love the fit of dbt with dev ops, regression testing, pipelines and the like› **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tim N. | Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Coupling of code with tests provides assurance changes have been implemented correctly **What do you dislike about dbt?** Speed in dbt cloud is not speed of thought response **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Financial reporting, dbt particularly good at checking and validating ### 17. dbt is just awesome! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Victor Manuel U. | Business Intelligence Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 25, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** macros, data lineage and documentation are my favorite features **What do you dislike about dbt?** I'd love to use dbt across multiple databases at the same time on the same project, and that's not possible yet **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** dbt is focused on managing the data transformation process, and that's what we use it for. dbt is helping us with: i) keeping our data warehouse organized, ii) providing better visibility to the team about the existing data, iii) building better data models, and thus better dashboards, and better insights, iv) and on top of that, it's a tool that allows us to work in a collaborative workspace. ### 18. dbt is a game changer! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 08, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** The simplicity with which we can model, test our logic, and update queries to help create systematic improvements is unparalleled. I love that you can test and run while only selecting certain parent/child models. This saves tons of time for us. **What do you dislike about dbt?** I really wish we could ingest files directly to dbt without having to use a file ingestion software. If we could connect directly to things like salesforce/google drive, etc, I would love that. Dislikes are tough to come up with as we are pretty satisfied with our needs. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** The problems that dbt solves for us is modeling. The ability to jump into a data stack early in the flow is important, and dbt allows us to standardize definitions across all of our source types. ### 19. My experience with dbt has been transformational, and has democratized data engineering at the org **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** - The fact that is it sql-based - Cloud UI is ver intuitive - Easy to learn **What do you dislike about dbt?** - Cloud IDE is kind of slow - Rebuilding data models is sometimes slow - No resources on how to optimize jobs **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** - Democratizing data eng across organizations - Establishing a universal source of truth downstream for all orgs - Ability to stand up data infrastructure quickly ### 20. DBT is a very intuitive tool with advanced features that'll help scale your analytics teams **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Breaking down reusable CTEs into separate tables/views increases scalability and consistency. **What do you dislike about dbt?** Some of the config features like making tables incremental can be a little confusing and tough to get right on the first try. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Allowing the Analtyics team be self-serve on typical engineering tasks. We are also able to dictate source-of-truth definitions by building the reusable CTEs ### 21. One of the best data transformations tool on the market **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alexander V. | Senior Data Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** What I love about DBT is the ease of use! You only need to know SQL to do all the data transformations you need **What do you dislike about dbt?** The only downside that comes to mind is the fact that there are a lot of tools you can use to work with DBT, and finding the right one might be tricky **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** We automated all our data warehouse transformations with the help on DBT ### 22. DBT will change how you think about data **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tim F. | Lead Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 25, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** DBT will change how you develop analytics in a good way. With a background in software engineering developing analytics with DBT has started the revolution for analytical engineering. Testing, smaller components and built-in documentation. **What do you dislike about dbt?** DBT can feel at times death by YAML files for configuring your setup. DBT cloud could be better if it allowed the execution of more outside python resources like FAL or re_data. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** we solve almost all of our data problems inside of DBT. data tests have allowed us to speed up our ability to understand problems and the documentation engine is pushing our team to think about this and how everything flows with data lineage. ### 23. dbt is THE way to manage your SQL transformations - version control and all kinds of other tools! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ward W. | Financial Advisor, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 12, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Dbt is a revelation for the analytics/BI engineering space. The seamless version control and 'don't repeat yourself' tools make your data and analytics pipelines WAY more reliable and efficient. Build data like a developer! **What do you dislike about dbt?** There are still some things that dbt can handle better like managing ALL your SQL data warehouse functionality like UDFs and other non-model-building things. I have high hopes that dbt will 'fast follow' features like this though. **Recommendations to others considering dbt:** I actually don't know what the alternative to dbt is. I'm sure one must exist other than more 'roll your own' options like Apache Airflow, say, bu tin terms of super easy managed/cloud data transforms, dbt really does seem to be THE tool to use. It's $50/month per dev, BUT there's a FREE version for 1 dev seat with no read-only access for anyone else, so you can always start with that and then buy yourself a seat later. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm now adapting ALL my data transformations in my Fivetran -> Snowflake -> visualizations data pipelines using dbt. The productivity gains + better accuracy/less bugs introduced are HUGE. There's definitely some upfront work to learn dbt (not hard if you're already a SQL expert AND if you have a little git or coding familiarity), but man is it worth it! ### 24. Excellent product **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Documentation, testing. Combination of sql and yaml. **What do you dislike about dbt?** Nothing found yet. If pushed I'd say that there's been one occasion where dbt downtime meant I couldn't work when I had time set aside **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Keeping the db simple and documented for other users ### 25. Avid longtime customers **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 09, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Foundational data modeling for reporting in external tools. Testing and data correctness framework. Data-as-code continious deployment and automation. Documentation. **What do you dislike about dbt?** A lot of repretitive data crunching that is somewhat hard to eliminate. Even with incremental models, subsequent models still make a full data transform. More caching / incremental tools for downstream models would be appreciated. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Customer data and behavioral analytics. Unifying data from multiple sources for ease of access. Creating snapshots and time series data from mutable tables in various sources. ### 26. Great for analytics engineering **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Elizabeth Y. | Analytics Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Being able to easily navigate between models and see the full picture of our dag in development **What do you dislike about dbt?** Not sure if this is already built, but checking for column field lineage **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helps analytics engineer with developing clean and reliable data models ### 27. all the things I missed when working in data warehouse **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Online Media | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** integration with git lineage autogenerated documentation templating possibilities **What do you dislike about dbt?** adds complexity for users not familiar with git lack of code formatting by default **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** it allows collaboration for outside stakeholders adds documentation and lineage, testing and source freshness ### 28. DBT is the standard for analytics engineering today **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Legal Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 18, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** DBT centralizes all of your SQL transformation, provides the infrastructure for version control, facilitates running tests on your data as it is transformed, and orchestrates the jobs that push your transformations to production. **What do you dislike about dbt?** I haven't found anything in DBT yet that I dislike. The community is great, the customer support is great, and the speed of improvement has been terrific. Nothing bad to say! **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** DBT allows us to model, transform, and orchestrate our entire data flow from the data warehouse with raw data to our production analytics DB. Having all this centralized makes it super easy to onboard new team members and keep code quality + documentation high. ### 29. dbt is an essential component of our tech stack **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael C. | Senior Director, Data & Analytics, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** easy to use those w/ SQL skillsets are locked & loaded to leverage dbt **What do you dislike about dbt?** nothing that I can think of! the product is great! **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** it helps us process & summarize customer data, working well w/ our dwh ### 30. dbt - believe the hype! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 07, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** As a development framework, it's hard to imagine something more collaborative, accessible, yet also lending itself to software development best practices. **What do you dislike about dbt?** While its SQL basis makes development simple and straightforward, it can sometimes feel a bit limiting. Thankfully templating (and now python) alleviates a lot of this. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** dbt is empowering data teams to keep pace with rapidly evolving business logic in high growth settings, and to do so sustainably. We've been able to scale with far fewer headcount thanks to dbt. ### 31. DBT is top-notch. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ryan H. | Analytics Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 14, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** DBT makes developing a data warehouse fun. My favorite is the testing functionality. I am no longer anxious that reports are sent with incorrect data! **What do you dislike about dbt?** I don't love the UI. However, I develop mostly locally. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data testing, documentation and warehousing. ### 32. Necessary for all data teams **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Accounting | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** dbt allows small teams to tenfold their workflow. Small hassle changes are made easier and make sense with dbt. dbt allows you to build on past work quickly and easily. The dbt community is also amazing to be a part of. **What do you dislike about dbt?** They're new and relatively young so not all the features are there for an optimized workflow. But they are working on it. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Metrics alignment, single source of truth for data. ### 33. Easy to use , ci/cd, versioning control, data lineage in one app **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Data lineage and github integration for versioning control **What do you dislike about dbt?** A bit steep learning curve for first timer since it use new methodology **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Github integration for version control. Data lineage for ELT ### 34. The perfect tool for the job **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 14, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** The cloud IDE is well-designed and executed, with great attention to detail. The overall design of the tool exactly meets the need of the analytics engineering problem. **What do you dislike about dbt?** I dislike nothing, but two areas for future development might be (1 )column-level data lineage and (2) data-diff tools, both of which could help with evaluating the impacts of a model change before deploying it. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Adding an abstraction layer on top of SQL allows me to write code to generate my transformations instead of coding them directly, saving time, adding power, and improving reusability. ### 35. One of the best Transformation product **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lijo L. | data engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 16, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Ease of use and setup Transformation logic can be written easily Python model makes it very much flexible **What do you dislike about dbt?** Macros error debugging gets clumsy at times **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helps me to write transformation logic easily structured DB modelling ### 36. Absolute game changer for data transformations without the need of data engineer expertise **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pawel G. | Product Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 18, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** dbt Cloud DAG orchestration (upstream and downstream handling) and model lineage graph (visualise your entire transformation layer) **What do you dislike about dbt?** For a self-starter, there are so many useful features like exposures or hooks that need more explanation and/or examples **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Pure and simple: data transformations without the need of a data engineer. Everything is maintainable by a SQL-wielding data analyst ### 37. Love it, so far. Still getting up to speed. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** John M. | BI Developer/Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Could based; transparency of how everything is built and executed; the support from dbt and the user community; integrated documentation, testing, and git repository; dbt leverages team SQL knowledge. **What do you dislike about dbt?** How to find and use packages and macros is not intuitive. If you're new to dbt, it's hard to know what's available, or how to approach a specific use case. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Loading data vault on snowflake. We are replacing another tool that was too cumbersome and inefficient. ### 38. Great tool - fast development experience **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 30, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Time saving of having fully integrated tool - faster development experience than managing my own IDE, query tool and command line/git **What do you dislike about dbt?** git branches that are deleted still stick around for some reason, dark mode glitches and becomes light mode on some tabs, SQL preview window glitches and freezes **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Collaborating on data pipeline design and creation of data assets ### 39. great product, helpful team and community **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 20, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** dbt itself is a great tool - it's flexible and easy to use, and the learning curve isn't too steep (as it's largely SQL-based). It's easy to transform, test, and move data around, and because dbt sits between raw data and BI tools, it's possible to experiment, add business logic, and make changes to how data is transformed even retroactively. Also, the team is very helpful (we engaged them as consultants to set up our data stack), the documentation is clear, and the slack community is a good resource. **What do you dislike about dbt?** It's just one piece of a complete stack - you'll need a warehouse, a tool like Stitch or Fivetran to get data there, and a BI tool. I mostly use dbt with a CLI, but the cloud product can be a bit slow. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's a core part of our data stack that centralizes how data is transformed and how business logic is applied so that everyone at our company can see the same results. It organizes and joins data from disparate sources so it's easier to understand and use. ### 40. DBT is incredible and the people who work there are awesome! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 19, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** DBT truly feels like it was created by analysts for analysts! It is intuitive, approachable, functional and honestly really fun to use. In the past, at another company, our analytics team was very dependent on Data Engineering to build our ETLs (primarily in Java) and aggregate tables even though we already had SQL created for the table we wanted to build. With DBT, you can remove the dependency on Engineering, move quickly, iterate, and learn more about analytics engineering as its own interesting functional area. We also worked with consultants at DBT labs for two 3-month engagements to refactor our growing repository and they were extremely professional, knowledgable, and fun! Would highly recommend it! **What do you dislike about dbt?** It's difficult to think of things I dislike about DBT and it just keeps getting better and better as DBT continually listens and learns from its vibrant community. One thing I can think of is I wish it was possible to integrate DBT Docs directly into existing BI Tools. **Recommendations to others considering dbt:** Go for it! You won't regret! **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use DBT for cleaning, transforming, testing, and modeling our source of truth datasets in our data warehouse. Our BI tools then leverage these datasets for important analysis and KPI tracking. We've also built important data frameworks within DBT to enable dynamic downstream ananlysis. ### 41. DBT Rocks **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 28, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Dbt is the best data pipelining tool I have ever used. DBT is extremely great at making it easy enough so analysts and data scientist can write their own pipelines, and integrate into other tools **What do you dislike about dbt?** DBT's scheduling software isn't my favorite -- but I know they're actively trying to fix it. Likewise, I don't love DBT's stream capabilities. **Recommendations to others considering dbt:** Snowflake works really well with dbt -- but it does weird things with timestamps in incremental runs **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** DBT solves all of our data cleaning and pipelining work. It speeds up everything and is great. ### 42. Makes data transformations easy to maintain **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Maintaining data transformations are easy with SQL- and git-based workflow. Integrates nicely with Big Query. **What do you dislike about dbt?** IDE is not perfect but improving. Git support lacks some basic functionalities. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Maintaining our data pipelines is easier with dbt than other tools or techiques I've tried. ### 43. DBT review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 13, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** I like how DBT gives the tools to analysts to create production-level data without needing engineering effort. This allows us to have more control over our workflow. **What do you dislike about dbt?** I find some of the syntax to be a bit painful but overall, I haven't had any big issues with the product. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Performing ETL on raw tables to prep them for analysis and visualizations and then pushing them to our warehouse\other tools. DBT allows analysts to create these tables without needing engineering effort. ### 44. Very useful and easy to use. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** I can create project and manage with git and also I can connect my db easily I can create secrets and manage them for each project. **What do you dislike about dbt?** Actually I have nothing to this question. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** I can manage my data and connect to databeses ### 45. Really helpful for cleaning up data **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** The product is really good, but the support documentation and community surrounding the product are really helpful in implementing the product. **What do you dislike about dbt?** It takes a lot of training to get competent with the product - not unexpected. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Orchestrating our data into usable models ### 46. Good if you have the software development experience and desire to manage database models as code **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Real Estate | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 14, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** The ease, or in fact requirement, to use a repository is great if you are a developer who is used to that sort of thing and like what it offers you. Having the history of the data models tracked in this manner is great. **What do you dislike about dbt?** Moves a lot of work to the data warehouse and doesn't replace an ETL tool. Nothing says dbt should be replacing an ETL tool but that's very much how I see it being used, which is unfortunate. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Keeping track of changes to the database structure and the logic used in the creation of metrics is now a very simple process using dbt and a git repository. Additionally being able to easily build tests into those models is a time saver. ### 47. Director **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 28, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Very simple architecture written in SQL. I also love the community - lots of models have been built so it's easy to repackage. **What do you dislike about dbt?** DBT cloud needs some work. It constantly refreshes and bugs out. I'd also like to see better alerting capabilities on job failures. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** DBT is making it easy for the pissed off business analyst to create useful databases. It's doing away with the technical skills gap that has existed historically. ### 48. Must-have tool for every analytics team **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Logistics and Supply Chain | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 28, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** dbt formalizes software engineering best practices into our analytics workflow. Version control, data modeling, testing, documentation, etc. rolled into one toolkit that accommodates a big chunk of our data team's (and even a data engineer's) work. It's a life-changer, especially for diverse analytics teams whose members do not necessarily come from an engineering background. **What do you dislike about dbt?** Nothing at all. The least favorable aspect I can think of is that the price for dbt Cloud is a bit high (per user), which may be prohibitive for larger teams who would like to test it out first without the need to measure ROI. Still, dbt-core is open-source and can be set up easily without purchasing subscriptions yet, so the price is not exactly a blocker. **Recommendations to others considering dbt:** Just do it. Help your team be more productive. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** With dbt, we're able to clean and model our datasets flexibly. The main benefits are, our data engineers were able to focus on data integration, while our data analysts (who know our data better) were able to develop and maintain data models themselves. The flexibility in delegating the modeling work to our analysts has unlocked significant value, both in terms of data pipeline stability and the quality & usability of our downstream datasets. ### 49. game changer technology **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Phong B. | Data Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 12, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** Data Catalog Feature. You can just build out your data warehouse while catalog feature takes care of documentation for you. **What do you dislike about dbt?** None. Maybe it would be a bit challenging for people who are not familiar with version control. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building out Data Warehouse and Data Marts while documenting the transformation with data catalog feature. Also save a lot on data engineering time ### 50. Transform, materialize, and automate your data with ease! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Derek P. | Business Intelligence Analyst, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 10, 2022 **What do you like best about dbt?** DBT allows users to perform data engineer tasks in the language of SQL efficiently. In addition, the use of Jinja language allows for testing automation. DBT also has a community on Discord to further learning. **What do you dislike about dbt?** Since DBT is new, the learning resources are not robust. Therefore, new users may have difficulty in knowing how to maximize efficiency. When the materialization fails, error messages are also not very descriptive. **What problems is dbt solving and how is that benefiting you?** DBT allows our company to stay lean by giving the responsibilities of a data engineer to a data analyst. In addition, we can automate a good portion of our ELT process. ## dbt Discussions - [What is DBT data Modelling?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-dbt-data-modelling) - 2 comments - [What is DBT technology?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-dbt-technology) - 2 comments - [What is DBT database tool?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-dbt-database-tool) - 1 comment - [What is DBT tool used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-dbt-tool-used-for) - 2 comments - [View dbt pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/dbt/reviews?page=4§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-23+02%3A48%3A17+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=d7055e2d-ef53-4b8e-87e5-24c0e94ae70f&secure%5Btoken%5D=c82a2eb3476fdc3378ef6769e075198ccc9f9e006bd465fe08f918f4f1a2d84a&format=llm_user) ## dbt Integrations - [Amazon EC2](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-ec2/reviews) - [Apache Airflow](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-airflow/reviews) - [Azure Databricks](https://www.g2.com/products/azure-databricks/reviews) - [Fivetran](https://www.g2.com/products/fivetran/reviews) - [GitHub](https://www.g2.com/products/github/reviews) - [Google Cloud BigQuery](https://www.g2.com/products/google-cloud-bigquery/reviews) - [Monte Carlo](https://www.g2.com/products/monte-carlo/reviews) - [PostgreSQL](https://www.g2.com/products/postgresql/reviews) - [Snowflake](https://www.g2.com/products/snowflake/reviews) - [Spark](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-spark/reviews) ## dbt Features **Reports** - Reports Interface - Steps to Answer - Graphs and Charts - Score Cards - Dashboards **Data Source Access** - Breadth of Data Sources - Ease of Data Connectivity - API Connectivity **Management** - Auditing **Data Management** - Data Integration - Metadata - Self-service - Automated workflows **Automation** - Workflow Automation - Multi-platform support - Data Management **Agentic AI - DataOps Platforms** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Decision Making **Deployment & Integration - Semantic Layer Tools** - Multi-Environment & Multi-Cloud Support - Open API & SDK Integration **Data Transformation** - Real-Time Analytics - Data Querying **Data Interaction** - Profiling and Classification - Metadata Management - Data Modeling - Data Joining - Data Blending - Data Quality and Cleansing - Data Sharing - Data Governance **Functionality** - Transformation - Automation - Scalability **Analytics** - Analytics capabilities - Dasboard visualizations **Functionality** - Documentation management - Platform support - Template functionality **Data Connectivity & Federation - Semantic Layer Tools** - Cross-Source Query Federation - Dynamic Schema & Metadata Adaptation **Data Exporting** - Breadth of Integrations - Ease of Integrations - Data Workflows **Monitoring and Management** - Data Observability - Testing capabilities **Administration** - Error Alerts - Service Automation - Workflow management **Data Modeling & Metrics - Semantic Layer Tools** - Derived & Calculated Metrics - Time Intelligence Functions **Connectivity** - Hadoop Integration - Spark Integration - Multi-Source Analysis - Data Lake **Functionality** - Identification - Correction - Normalization - Preventative Cleaning - Data Matching **Cloud Deployment** - Hybrid cloud support - Cloud migration capabilities **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation **Agentic AI - Data Warehouse Automation** - Proactive Assistance **Performance Optimization - Semantic Layer Tools** - Query Caching & Acceleration - Adaptive Query Optimization **Self Service ** - Calculated Fields - Data Column Filtering - Data Discovery - Search - Collaboration / Workflow - Automodeling **Operations** - Data Workflow - Governed Discovery - Embedded Analytics - Notebooks **Management** - Reporting - Automation - Quality Audits - Dashboard - Governance **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation - AI Text Summarization **Governance - Semantic Layer Tools** - AI Governance & Observability - Metric Lineage for AI Training Data - Version Control & Change Impact Analysis **Advanced Analytics** - Predictive Analytics - Data Visualization - Big Data Services **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation - AI Text Summarization **Advanced Intelligence - Semantic Layer Tools** - Natural Language Query Interface - Semantic Layer for AI/ML Models - Recommendation Engine **Agentic AI Enablement - Semantic Layer Tools** - Agentic Query Orchestration - Contextual Reasoning Layer - Workflow Automation via Semantic Agents **Building Reports** - Data Transformation - Data Modeling - Integration APIs **Platform** - Mobile User Support - Customization - User, Role, and Access Management - Internationalization - Sandbox / Test Environments - Performance and Reliability - Breadth of Partner Applications ## Top dbt Alternatives - [Databricks](https://www.g2.com/products/databricks/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (1,322 reviews) - [Alteryx](https://www.g2.com/products/alteryx/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (847 reviews) - [Google Cloud BigQuery](https://www.g2.com/products/google-cloud-bigquery/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (1,144 reviews)