Meltano Reviews & Product Details

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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.) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I miss the integrated GUI that was recently removed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Love that everything is in a single code base, which also leads to things just continuing to work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Takes some time to understand all of the functionality Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not much? The speed at which the SDK gets new features can be hard to stay on top of?! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.