Estuary Flow

What do you like best about the product?

It's so easy to set up connectors to any of my applications and databases and replicate that data in real-time. Not only that, but I only need one connector per source but can send that source to multiple destinations.

What do you dislike about the product?

Sometimes the documentation can be a bit hard to follow for more complex connectors, but can typically figure it out within a few minutes.

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

It helps replicate data in real-time without it being difficult to set up, manage the infrastructure, or cost similar to the likes of Fivetran

What do you like best about the product?

The Pre-Sales Process:

The Estuary team was very responsive, offered great support when it came to explaining what the product is good for and cases where it is not yet capable of ticking some boxes. The honesty and straight-forward approach was much appreciated and unusual in the space. Everybody we interacted with was very hands-on and had deep technical knowledge so answers came quickly in short timeframes and deadline pressures, and in cases where use-cases were complex, we were offered solutions and workarounds tailored to our needs.

The POC Process

Getting access to, and implementing the tool was very easy and efficient. Most of the connectors we required were already available and we were given clear information about which ones were (importantly) on the roadmap with timelines, making it easy to build trust. There were really cool additional features we made use of, such as Terraform compatibility and a command line tool, so we could spin up pipelines repeatably and reliably with a little bit of initial research around these features.

The Sales Process

The Estuary product was far more affordable than other products when it came to our use-case of tall narrow tables with many rows, since they have a Data Ingress/Egress based billing. This worked far better for us than other tools which take a row-based approach to billing, despite our total table sizes being comparatively small. We felt they partnered well with us and helped us find ways for us to do things more efficiently and had our best interests at heart, and it made for a mutually beneficial business relationship.

The Tool Itself

Estuary Flow has been a reliable tool, a real data/technical person's tool. The basics are simple to set up, but it does not preclude the ability for you to customize pipelines. It is very extensible. The architecture is robust and scalable and we have used it reliably for about a year with very few issues.

The Support

This is a very important area and Estuary have delivered on this in a stellar way. On the few occasions that we have had minor issues - Support from the team was very responsive; offering updates, feedback, timelines and solutions in real-time and really giving us the kind of peace of mind we need, at almost all hours. In some cases, where it was sensed that there may be misunderstandings; , they were happy to dig in on our behalf to sort urgent matters out quickly, . They maintained a great level of friendly professionalism and there was never a sense of apathy towards our needs, which can be common with some other data pipeline tools out there (especially the really big ones with heavy support processes and protocols, sending screenshots back and forth)

What do you dislike about the product?

There are almost no down-sides besides the fact that they are still building their number of connectors up to a number that rivals other data platforms (but cover most of the important connectors).

I would say that some of the terminology relating to pipeline components can be a bit confusing at first, but this is also because every data tool names things differently, so this is also more of an industry-wide issue as opposed to an Estuary-specific. Reading through the documentation a couple of time will generally orient you well.

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

We are using it for streaming replication of our transactional databases to our analytics warehouses. We also use the tool to ingest data from third-party tools and applications to get an integrated view of our data in our warehouse.

What do you like best about the product?

Estuary is easy to configure not just in the UI, but also maintain using their flow documentation specification using CI/CD processes. This means you can do a baseline configuration in the UI and then immediately push that to your programmatic processes. The team is also extremely easy to engage with on their Slack.

What do you dislike about the product?

Estuary does have a small barrier to entry for configuration of your own buckets to store state as compared to other products on the market. I believe overall this is better for customer security.

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

Data movement for all aspects of the business; while also driving down latency to ensure the ability to use that data for any use case. Usually real-time systems such as Estuary are cost prohibitive either via engineering time to maintain a custom solution or other traditional ETL tools which are much more focused on locking you in to their system, rather than providing value.

What do you like best about the product?

I wanted to ETL Data from AWS Postgres to Snowflake and other AI tools. I tried a lot of routes including moving it to S3 and then to Snowflake via Snowpipe. Sometimes the data pipe worked but sometimes I have to manually run the copy queries.

After doing some research online I found out that Estuary Flow does the same pipe building with a click of a few buttons.

The same day I was able to migrate millions of rows. My S3 cost was reduced and I was able to achieve near real-time streaming.

What do you dislike about the product?

Estuary can get the job done but it is not very popular within the E-comm sector. I hope they reach more people.

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

We have all our prod data hosted in Aws Postgres. We could not run analytical queries on them because of the size of the database. We decided to move our data to Snowflake to run OLAP queries. Estuary Flow helped us in moving the data with very little effort.

What do you like best about the product?

It was super easy to set up a real-time streaming data pipeline using change data capture for my database that lives in a secured network. The Estuary team was super helpful when I reached out for some support. Since then, the data flow has been continuously running without any issues for months. The data arrives in the destination in real-time, with schema changes properly handled.

Setting up the connectors didn't take more than a few minutes and the many integrations made it super easy to connect all of our services.

Our whole team is onboarded and uses Estuary every time they need a new pipeline.

What do you dislike about the product?

The UI is a little bit outdated at some points but this takes nothing away from the functionality.

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

Estuary manages all our data flows from around 10 sources (databases, like Postgres and Oracle in addition to Salesforce, Hubspot, Mixpanel, ad Ad networks like Meta, Tiktok and Snapchat). Estuary connects these sources in real-time to our data warehouse via ETL where we can run historical analytics. We also integrate into Tinybird for real-time analytics without having to create new pipelines or duplicate the data.