--- 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: '2026-09-23' parent_category: name: IT Infrastructure url: https://www.g2.com/categories/it-infrastructure ---

dbt Pros and Cons: Top 5 Advantages and Disadvantages

Quick AI Summary Based on G2 Reviews

Generated from real user reviews

Users find dbt's ease of use exceptional, with straightforward setup and intuitive features enhancing their data transformation processes. (34 mentions)
Users appreciate the maintainability and clarity of dbt's SQL code base, enhancing collaboration and data transformations. (21 mentions)
Users value the automation of data workflows with dbt, enhancing maintainability and collaboration in SQL transformations. (17 mentions)
Users love the ease of transforming data with dbt, allowing for organized and efficient analytics workflows. (16 mentions)
Users value the data quality of dbt, praising its effectiveness in ensuring data integrity and operational efficiency. (14 mentions)
Users find that dbt has limited functionality due to rigidness and complex debugging, hindering project progress. (13 mentions)
Users face dependency issues in dbt, as model errors and upstream changes complicate troubleshooting and disrupt workflows. (12 mentions)
Users find the steep learning curve of dbt daunting, needing mastery of concepts like Jinja and Git. (10 mentions)
Users encounter poor error handling with unclear messages, making troubleshooting frustrating and complicating the user experience. (9 mentions)
Users often face confusing error reporting and unclear messages, making troubleshooting and identifying issues challenging. (9 mentions)

5 Pros or Advantages of dbt

5 Cons or Disadvantages of dbt

Sangavi D.
SD
Sangavi D.
Data Engineering
Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
"DBT review"
3.5/5
What do you like best about dbt?

Using SQL queries, it is easy platform to transform the data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about dbt?

For legacy system its is not useful for tranformation Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Information Technology and Services
AI
Verified User in Information Technology and Services
Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
"DBT review"
4/5
What do you like best about dbt?

DBT is user friendly and helps keep our data reliable, updated and secure Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about dbt?

Upgrading from core is really expensive without there being any significant differences besides number of users Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Financial Services
AF
Verified User in Financial Services
Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
"Great experience with dbt"
5/5
What do you like best about dbt?

dbt is the best Transformation tool out there in the industry and I love dbt for its testing capabilities and modeling and semantic layer. Ease of use and how easily you could maintain

It is easy to integrate with other tools like integration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about dbt?

dbt should add more AI capabilities faster Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

📈 Rho L.
📈L
📈 Rho L.
Business Intelligence Analyst
Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
"It's like seeing an old friend that you really liked but haven't seen for a while."
5/5
What do you like best about dbt?

At its core, DBT aligns three technologies to deliver knowledge better: SQL, YAML, & Jinja. You can do a lot with just SQL and YAML. Adding in Jinja makes SQL feel a lot more like traditional development. I kinda missed that. It's like seeing an old friend that you really liked but haven't seen for a while.

dbt is magic for transforming and modeling data. It's a platform that allows us to wrangle, shape, and organize the data to model the business. With the help of DBT, we can implement the principle of separation of concerns to organize and manage our transformations.

One of the key tools DBT offers is Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), maps that illustrate the path our data takes from source to the final destination. These maps illustrate the data transformation arc. We start with the source data, which is often messy and unrefined. We use DBT to perform a series of transformations, taking the data on a journey from a multiverse of chaos to a world of understanding. We clean the data, apply business rules, and ensure the data conforms to our business dimensional models. These models or core business logic serve as the foundation for reporting.

As we progress along the transformation arc, our data starts to take shape. We can build data marts for specific business areas or functions. These data marts are built with our business dimensional models, ensuring that the data is structured in a way that supports efficient analysis and reporting.

Reporting on top of our business dimensional models. With the data now organized and modeled in a meaningful way, we can unlock valuable insights and empower decision-makers with actionable information . . . at scale. We can slice and dice the data, apply filters, and drill down into specific dimensions to understand trends, patterns, and outliers. The reports we develop are consistent because they come from a single source of truth, the business dimensional model. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about dbt?

dbt requires a mindset change. You have to buy into how they think about modeling. It's opinionated. dbt is method-agnostic (data vault, mesh, kimball). But structure matters and you need to spend some time to understand dbt's mindset around structure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Rulyan R.
RR
Rulyan R.
Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
"dbt makes it easier to onboarding analysts to good software engineering best practices"
5/5
What do you like best about dbt?

Its easy to use even for newcomers and dbt also uses sql that is the most democratic language for data manipulation. From the start is very quick to integrate with your data stack in just a few clicks. I use dbt for for data transformation and data modelling every day and its many features like data lineage, version control, ci and slim ci, testes, documentation, model contracts make it easy to apply DataOps in you project Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about dbt?

Its feature to model in python depends on the data plataform you are using. Its IDE still misses some of the functionalities that other IDE have that make development more easy, but new features are rolling out every new release of dbt cloud Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Uddipan M.
UM
Uddipan M.
Engineering Manager
Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
"Data Transformation to Enable Analytics Engineering"
5/5
What do you like best about dbt?

Easy to write transformation in SQL language augmented by Jinja templating techniques. Support of Python models is powerful. Good library of Open source Macros makes life easy for Analytics engineers. Write test cases to test model results. Powerful documentation capabilities. Works very well with Snowflake. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about dbt?

To use DBT effectively, one needs to learn how to modularize SQL using CTEs. Bit advanced knowledge in SQL really helps. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

DM
Donovan M.
Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
"A great environment and a powerful daily tool for Data Analysts and Engineers."
5/5
What do you like best about dbt?

dbt Cloud - I recommend it to every org to get Data Analysts & Analytics engineers up and running quickly without having difficulty setting up during the onboarding.

It's easier to adopt new teammates when they get to dive into the models immediately and add value sooner and solidify their grasp early. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about dbt?

I dislike navigating the logs in the Job Runs tab.

The titles don't seem intuitive and the content could be more streamlined for finding faults. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Emily B.
EB
Emily B.
Labor Law Specialist
Staffing and Recruiting
Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
"Our analytics are more reliable and efficient"
4/5
What do you like best about dbt?

I'm thrilled to explore how dbt revolutionizes our work by delving deeply into the data world. It's a total game-changer providing remarkable simplicity in formulating and utilizing data code within our warehouse. When it comes to version control, dbt streamlines the entire process ensuring a smooth experience and maintaining crucial data models for analysis. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about dbt?

It would be good if dbt made it easier for new folks. It can do a lot with data stuff, but figuring how to set it up and use all its cool things can feel hard at first. More intuitive guides or a simpler way to learn the basics would make it nicer for people just starting with data changes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Roland P.
RP
Roland P.
Data specialist
Computer Networking
Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)
"Using dbt has improved accuracy and collaboration in our data projects"
4.5/5
What do you like best about dbt?

In my role I absolutely love using dbt - it's the ultimate tool for transforming data with ease. It effortlessly integrates into our current systems making our analytics work a breeze. We're all in on dbt because it excels at data transformation and organization boosting our efficiency and collaborative efforts tremendously. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about dbt?

It would be fantastic if dbt could enhance its toolkit for visual data modeling. At present, it's heavily focused on coding but integrating a more visual approach to working with data would undoubtedly elevate its utility, especially for individuals who gravitate towards graphical methods for data analysis. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Insurance
UI
Verified User in Insurance
Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
"Transformation step of ETL/ELT pipelines made easy"
5/5
What do you like best about dbt?

Using DBT Cloud, the IDE is very intuitive, project lineage diagrams are very helpful. The general use of Jinja referencing and CTE's within the models made the flows very easy to follow, even with very large complex datasets that require lots of transformation. DBT integrates very easily with multiple ELT tools that we have used. Have all transformations in SQL form just makes everything easier. Being scheduled easily, we run multiple DBT pipelines daily. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about dbt?

With DBT Cloud you can only have one project per user without paying for a payed tier of the product, which is fair but makes for harder collaboration at this level. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.