# Meltano Reviews **Vendor:** Meltano **Category:** [ETL Tools](https://www.g2.com/categories/etl-tools) **Average Rating:** 4.9/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 7 ## About Meltano Meltano brings joy to Extract & Load. By unlocking software development workflows for data movement, it gives data engineers complete control and visibility of their pipelines, delivering unparalleled efficiency and confidence in every change. With a workflow built around a Git repository, YAML files, and a CLI, a library of 550+ open source connectors, and an SDK for custom connectors, data teams can fetch data from anywhere, send data anywhere, and transform their data their way. Meltano is open source and can be self-managed or deployed on Meltano Cloud. ## Meltano Reviews ### 1. With Meltano, I get to spend my time delivering business value and not worrying about my tools **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Matt M. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 15, 2023 **What do you like best about Meltano?** The best thing about Meltano is that it's simple and easy to use. It's portable, so I can run it on the command line, or in a docker container, or in any number of orchestration tools. There's a very active open source community and there are hundreds of plugins to connect to data sources and destinations, and if a plugin doesn't exist, there is good tooling provided to create one. **What do you dislike about Meltano?** I don't think this is a "dislike", per se, but Meltano is a young and fast-growing project. Sometimes that means that documentation is not current. I've had good luck connecting with the Meltano team in their Slack community though, as a workaround. **What problems is Meltano solving and how is that benefiting you?** My team is small. We need to be able to pull data from our platform's transactional database, and from key third-party integrations, into our analytics warehouse, but as a small team we don't have the capacity to write custom integrations or build bespoke data connectors. Meltano has allowed us to move extremely quickly - it is truly not an exaggeration when I say that in the three months since we've adopted Meltano, we've made ten times more progress on our strategic business goals than we had in the entire year prior (when we were using PySpark for ETL purposes and having to write more of our own orchestration tooling and all of our own data connectors). ### 2. We estimate a $50k savings by moving a single tap from a well-known cloud competitor to Meltano **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andy C. | Senior Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 15, 2023 **What do you like best about Meltano?** Meltano removes the complexity of creating, maintaining, and running data pipelines. With so many taps and targets pre-built, it feels like Plug’n’Play. Creating custom taps and targets is super easy with the Meltano SDK. All the managerial tasks are handled under the hood, leaving you to focus on getting or consuming the data you need. We estimate a $50k savings by moving a single tap from a well-known cloud competitor to Meltano. **What do you dislike about Meltano?** With so many features baked into Meltano, navigating the documentation can be challenging. However, I've gotten around this by using Bing AI search, which brings me the answer immediately. **What problems is Meltano solving and how is that benefiting you?** Meltano helps us extract and load data from our operational data stores to our data lake. Meltano makes it easy to implement hundreds of pre-built taps and targets to accomplish this task. ### 3. Moving billions of rows each day for 2+ years **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Josh L. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 14, 2023 **What do you like best about Meltano?** Amazingly easy to get started. "It just works" and is reliable for the long-haul. The community (mostly on Slack) is easily one of the most friendly, responsive, active, and knowleagable I've run into among open source tools. The number of taps and targets is astounding and growing rapidly. Configuring a brand new tap/target that already exists usually only takes a few minutes. You spend longer getting your credentials than you spend setting up your plugin for the first time. That is also a statement on just how incredibly easy Meltano makes it to create a new tap from scratch. I've built numerous taps with their SDK and some of them I was able to build them in less than a day. Because it's a code-based tool, collaboration among multiple engineers is way more effective than GUI-based competitors. However, even though it's code-based, you actually don't need "real" coding skills unless your are going to create a brand new tap/target. It's mostly yaml templating and cli commands with some docker/cloud knowledge be useful if you are going to roll your own custom deployment. I love open source and I think of Meltano as a company/community that is doing open source right. They play well with a lot of other open source tools (Dagster, Airflow, dbt, Great Expectations, Superset, etc.) **What do you dislike about Meltano?** It doesn't do real-time streaming, at least not that I know of; though, in theory I wonder if it could ...? Its "orchestration" capabilities are limited because it's not intended to be a full orchestrator. For example, I have some pipelines that need to run hundreds taps with small variations in their configurations. Similarly, if you have to run any type of custom code before or after your replication, Meltano can't do that. In order to do this type of thing efficiently you need an external orchestrator (like Dagster, or Airflow). So I use Dagster to make Meltano CLI calls. That being said, the vast majority of situations can be handled by Meltano's built in orchestration capabilities (scheduling, E, L, and T) Each tap/target has its quirks that you have to either live with or be willing to fix; though, the prevalence of of these plugins that need some sort of "intervention" is very low. The vast majority of use cases are covered, for sure, but you don't know until you try. **What problems is Meltano solving and how is that benefiting you?** Replicating large amounts of data on a batch/daily basis from internal source systems and external, third-party APIs (corporate tools). ### 4. Excellent! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Quinn B. | Machine Learning Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 04, 2023 **What do you like best about Meltano?** I’ve been moving >1TB/day with Meltano for over a year now at a negligible cost; the next best alternative would’ve cost over a million or at least one FTE data engineer. It saves us at least $1M/yr and makes my job easy. **What do you dislike about Meltano?** It's a young tool, still changing fast; keep your eyes on best practices as it evolves. But the team is responsive and the community is super friendly. Definitely join the Slack community, too! **What problems is Meltano solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's my primary extract & load (as in ELT/ETL) tool for our data warehouse. It's been an excellent choice for us & handles a large volume of data w/ reliability. Has been super easy to maintain even pre-1.0. ### 5. Very Satisfied User **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dan N. | Hospital & Health Care, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 15, 2023 **What do you like best about Meltano?** Meltano is a beautifully crafted masterpiece that is intuitive to use and as easy to manage as my buzz cut. If you do get stuck, the friendly and talented Meltano Community members are always there to get you moving toward your data goals again, and Melty is the cutest dragon mascot that looks cool plastered on all your stuff **What do you dislike about Meltano?** I miss the integrated GUI that was recently removed. **What problems is Meltano solving and how is that benefiting you?** Allows us to move data from Micorsoft SQL Server application backend to a Postgres data warehouse. ### 6. A single code base allowing us to test before anything hits production automatically **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Derek V. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 29, 2023 **What do you like best about Meltano?** Love that everything is in a single code base, which also leads to things just continuing to work. **What do you dislike about Meltano?** Takes some time to understand all of the functionality **What problems is Meltano solving and how is that benefiting you?** Standardizes a way to pull data from systems (taps) and push data to systems (targets), solving the N*M problem. Meltano also has the easiest tooling I've found for folks that want to run Singer ### 7. The way ELT should be! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gary J. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Meltano?** Meltano’s SDK and community support has given us back hours in creating and maintaining custom connectors for various platforms. Meanwhile, the CLI based approach has allowed our analytics engineers to rapidly scale our data pipelines whilst maintaining security and robustness. **What do you dislike about Meltano?** Not much? The speed at which the SDK gets new features can be hard to stay on top of?! **What problems is Meltano solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data ingestion to Snowflake, it's super easy to connect to any source, standard or bespoke, that we need and very quickly - [View Meltano pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/meltano/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-13+16%3A42%3A31+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=255a4554-b1bf-4387-80d1-b45f579cf4f7&secure%5Btoken%5D=12c0523d276c51fd752a43b1a9de50323c76f1b33a672f022cec8ec2e658d85d&format=llm_user) ## Meltano Features **Management** - Reporting - Auditing **Functionality** - Extraction - Transformation - Loading - Automation - Scalability ## Top Meltano Alternatives - [Databricks](https://www.g2.com/products/databricks/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (740 reviews) - [dbt](https://www.g2.com/products/dbt/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (204 reviews) - [Fivetran](https://www.g2.com/products/fivetran/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (776 reviews)