Jitterbit vs. Integrate.io: 3 Critical Differences

Table of Contents

Jitterbit is an all-in-one integration platform that serves a variety of use cases – including API Gateway, API manager, iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load), and more.

Integrate.io is a cloud-native unified data stack that has four major components: ETL/Reverse ETL, ELT (Extract, Load, and Transform) and CDC (Change Data Capture), API Generation, Data Observability Monitoring and Alerts.

The story of Jitterbit vs Integrate.io is one of legacy technology versus new technology, with all the attendant tradeoffs involved.

Specifically:

As an older offering (begun in 2003), Jitterbit has both a desktop/on-premises offering and a cloud offering. Integrate.io, founded in 2012, is cloud native.
Both tools have a massive selection of connectors, including many older software platforms. Integrate.io tends to have connectors to more modern platforms, while Jitterbit connects to a few more legacy platforms.
Both solutions support Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) data pipelines, featuring no-code transforms. Integrate.Io’s offering, formerly known as Xplenty, is cloud-native, whereas Jitterbit’s is a mix of cloud and desktop components.
Both solutions have Change Data Capture (CDC) capability, though Jitterbit’s CDC offering is far more limited than Integrate.io’s.
Both have API Generation / Integration Platform As A Service (IPaaS) capabilities.
Integrate.Io is the only offering to include Data Observability Monitoring and Alerts.

With this array of capabilities for each product, it may be difficult to see which offering is right for you. Let’s dive deeper into both platforms to help you understand which is the best fit for your organization.

Overview of Jitterbit vs. Integrate.io

Let’s start with a quick overview of the main features of both platforms.

Jitterbit Overview

Jitterbit offers an on-premises version (Data Designer), and a cloud-based version (Cloud Designer), which it uses to serve the following integration use cases:

Jitterbit App Integration (iPaaS) and API Management: Jitterbit’s application integration tools offer a host of pre-built connectors for the most popular apps and platforms. Whether you’re dealing with a SaaS, cloud, or on-premises application, you can use Jitterbit to connect it with apps, microservices, web services, or micro apps. Jitterbit’s API design and management features allow you to expose ODBC or JDBC databases as APIs, create APIs in any format (such as REST, SOAP, JSON, and OData), and more.
Jitterbit Data Integration (ETL): Jitterbit’s ETL tools let you pull data from the most popular data sources, transform it, and load it into the most popular relational database and data warehouse systems. Jitterbit includes a host of native connectors and prebuilt transformations for simple data pipelines. Experienced developers can also use the platform to code sophisticated ETL processes.
Jitterbit Cloud Dataloader (JCD) for Salesforce: One of Jitterbit’s most popular ETL features is a free, stripped-down version of Jitterbit called Cloud Data Loader for Salesforce. This app can pull and insert data to and from Salesforce. However, it only provides basic ETL services. For more functionality, you’ll need to upgrade to the full version of Jitterbit.

As an ETL solution, Jitterbit presents three primary challenges.

1) Retrofitted Software

Jitterbit currently offers its web-based Cloud Designer UI for managing cloud integrations. Cloud Designer is a retrofitted version of Jitterbit’s on-premises Design Studio UI. Because it is not a cloud-native platform, Cloud Designer can be sluggish when dealing with cloud integrations.

“What do you like best? Literally nothing. To say that Jitterbit Studio is in its 10th version cycle is absurd, and an insult to developers who stick to versioning cycles. I cannot get the studio to work on macOS, neither can their support team. The windows version frequently stumbles over itself because it doesn't even handle files on the filesystem properly. The cloud UI is slow and bad, good luck finding any relevant information on the activities page. Oh and try turning off schedules in the projects page just to watch them continue to run anyways! TRASH!” - Administrator in Media Production

2) Steep Learning Curve

Even though the Jitterbit platform offers no-code/low-code options for building ETL pipelines, you’ll still need to have training as a data engineer and coding experience to build the sophisticated integrations the platform is capable of.

“We've found that someone with basic SQL skills was easily able to become proficient with Jitterbit. Someone with no previous SQL or other database experience may have a more difficult time with it.” - Steve S., CIO

3) Lack of CDC Connectors

At the time of writing, Jitterbit’s CDC for Salesforce is in beta. Jitterbit lacks connectors for major database platforms like MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Considering these challenges, it’s important to ask the following questions before committing to Jitterbit:

Are you prepared to deal with a retrofitted on-premises solution that wasn’t originally designed to operate in the cloud? Jitterbit’s sluggish cloud-based operation could be a challenge for remote teams, especially in the post-COVID world, where remote work has become commonplace.
Are you willing to invest in Jitterbit’s learning curve?
Do you need Change Data Capture capabilities for some of your data sources to provide near-real-time updates of your data store, and enabling an Extract Load and Transform approach to data integration?

Integrate.io Overview

Integrate.io’s full-featured platform is a combination of four purpose-specific tools. Integrate.Io’s initial offering is an ETL component formerly known as Xplenty.com. With the acquisition of the FlyData for CDC, DreamFactory for API Generation, and the addition of a Data Observability component, Integrate has grown into a full-service integration offering with a name that recognizes the comprehensive nature of the platform. Let’s take a quick look at each of these components.

Integrate.io ETL

For ETL, Integrate.Io offers an intuitive, no-code/low-code user interface, which makes enterprise-grade data integrations available to everyone, regardless of their tech experience. Non-tech-savvy team members – from marketing, BI, and business analytics departments – can use Integrate.io to develop custom ETL workflows at a level that used to require a data engineer.

“Integrate.io is on PAR with enterprise-level tools.” - Guru Kiran S.

Moreover, Integrate.io’s ETL component integrates with the most popular data warehouses, comes with an impressive list of native connectors, and features a powerful REST API connector to integrate with virtually any data source/destination.

Here are some of Integrate.io’s native connectors:

There’s another feature that Integrate.io ETL brings to the table: Two-way Salesforce-to-Salesforce integrations for a fraction of the cost of solutions including Jitterbit, MuleSoft, and Talend

Here’s what you get with Integrate.io’s ETL components:

Cloud-native platform that operates 100% in the cloud, with no on-site hardware requirements
No-code/low-code UI for creating complex ETL workflows
More than 100 prebuilt, in-pipeline transformations
Large variety of pre-built connectors for a wide variety of sources/destinations
Native REST API connector special cases when a prebuilt connector doesn’t exist
The most advanced security and compliance features available
Advanced error logging capabilities
Automatic email alerts with no special configurations required
Easy copy-and-paste of previously-built packages for quick replication to other accounts
Scalable to virtually any processing and aggregation requirements through a dynamically-created cluster (contact Integrate.io for more details)
Unlimited telephone and video chat support to guide you through any data integration use-case
Two-way Salesforce to Salesforce integrations that extract Salesforce data, transform it, and inject it back into Salesforce (and more)

Compared to Jitterbit, Integrate.io ETL offers three distinct advantages:

1) Ease of Use

As we discussed above, Integrate.io ETL allows anyone can create data integrations without any special experience.

“Integrate.io's easy-to-use interface makes it possible for less-technical members of my team to dive in and create/edit ETL jobs and schedules. We use Integrate.io to enhance partner data, transform and add flexibility to how we structure and consume various data streams. Integrate.io makes this easy.” - Nick M., Director of Client Success

2) 100% Cloud-Native Platform for Remote Teams

Because Integrate.io ETL is a 100% cloud-native platform, its user interface is extremely fast, efficient, and accessible from anywhere.

“On average, remote employees worked 1.4 more days every month, or 16.8 more days every year, than those who worked in an office. And on those workdays, they spent more time getting things done.” - Airtasker

3) Better Security

Routine data integrations are not very risky when importing/exporting data on-premises. However, remote teams take a risk each time they log into an on-prem system. Because Integrate.io is a fully cloud-native integration platform, it reduces security risks by automating routine ETL tasks and isolating your pipelines from human-caused security breaches.

“Even if they’re using a VPN or remote desktop to access your on-premise systems, you’re still introducing an additional element of risk. That risk could be eliminated by adopting an automated ETL tool like Integrate.io that can handle these processes without human intervention.” - Integrate.io Blog

Integrate.io CDC

Integrate.io’s CDC platform is a full-featured CDC offering with hundreds of connectors out of the box. These include almost a hundred sources and the most popular data lake/data warehouse stores.

In contrast, Jitterbit only advertises a Salesforce connector that supports CDC, and that connector is in beta as of March 2023. Little more needs to be said on this subject: if CDC is a requirement, Integrate.io CDC is a far more mature and capable offering.

Integrate.io API Generation

The Integrate.io API generation platform is a full-featured API generation tool. It supports integrating SQL or NoSQL databases using SOAP or REST protocols. It also supports a full range of access control and security management, including SSO Authentication, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), CORS, Role-Based Access Control on API endpoints, record-level permissions on data, OAuth, LDAP, Active Directory, and SAML integration. In addition to generating APIs, the Integrate.io tool also generates full Swagger OpenAPI documentation, facilitating sharing of your API with internal stakeholders or external partners. Integrate.io supports public, private or hybrid infrastructures, on Linux, Windows or Mac OS X. Deployment options include Docker containers, Kubernetes, Bitnami, or direct deployment from Git.

For modern platforms, the Integrate.io and Jitterbit offerings are roughly comparable. The legacy nature of Jitterbit’s offering shows in that product’s support of EDI, a legacy format that is still in use in many organizations.

Jitterbit Price vs Integrate.io Price

Jitterbit Price

Although Jitterbit doesn’t disclose pricing information on its website, we did some digging and uncovered some valuable information. First, Jitterbit charges monthly through an annual contract. Licensing fees depend on (1) whether you choose the standard, professional, or enterprise tier of the platform, (2) the number of integrations you need, and (3) other business requirements.

As for the cost of the platform, this Reddit user was pricing MuleSoft and Jitterbit. The user received a quote from Jitterbit for $90,000 a year:

“MuleSoft $100,000 quote. Worth it? Hey y’all, my company is trying to make the decision between MuleSoft and Jitterbit. With the amount of connections, Jitterbit comes in about $10,000 cheaper. Has anyone done this comparison and made a choice? What was your choice and the deciding factors? Is MuleSoft worth the sticker price?” - Cathedermis

It’s important to remember that significant auxiliary costs will be required to operate Jitterbit. In fact, these costs will usually dwarf Jitterbit’s initial licensing fee:

Hiring expert integration staff: You’ll need to hire developers with the skills and training required to operate Jitterbit. This can cost as much as $100,000 in labor per year per team member.
Training/certifying replacement staff: Each time an employee leaves, you will incur additional training and certification costs to replace the staff member.
Hosting Jitterbit’s on-premises software: You may incur additional costs related to hosting Jitterbit’s on-premises integration software.

Other Reddit users were quick to point out the massive auxiliary costs users should expect with a Jitterbit-scale integration platform:

“The cost of owning middleware is a lot more than just the cost of the licenses… Despite the product pitch on the ease of building integrations – it requires deep technical skills to do it well. In a decent-sized organization, this could be several people – all paid a lot of money. So this isn't a difference of $10,000 – it's the lifetime total cost of ownership which is going to be in the millions for both in a typical organization.” - NothingDogg

“This is easily a 100k job even in many midwest locations and worse on the coasts. And that doesn't include the cost of benefits etc (another 30+%). That's one single admin/dev that trumps the cost of the licensing … This isn't a magic bullet that's going to miraculously solve problems for you for $80-100k, and neither one of these should be something you throw at a random dev or admin and say, "Hey figure this out and start dumping out endpoints/services/ETL stuff.”I have zero insight into your business or staffing, but I’ve seen this happen a lot and this is how improperly secured endpoints, breaches, and overall bad expectations/deliverables happen.” - DejectedExec

At the end of the day, Jitterbit licensing fees often range from $80,000 to $250,000 a year (or a great deal more). More importantly, when you add auxiliary costs into the mix, some enterprises with significant integration demands could be on the hook for over $1 million a year in licensing, labor, and other costs to operate the platform.

Here’s what a user of Jitterbit says about price:

“As the product has evolved the pricing model has been somewhat confusing. Perhaps a clearer definition of "endpoints", or tiered pricing based on types of endpoints would make more sense, e.g., endpoints within an organization (file shares, business systems), external endpoints and web services (Salesforce, AWS), etc. Ironically, the ease with which you can build out additional integrations makes it difficult to determine your pricing.” - Executive Sponsor in Legal Services

Integrate.io Pricing

The pricing for each of the Integrate.io components is clearly stated on their website. Let’s compare each component's pricing to Jitterbit.

Integrate.io ETL Pricing

Integrate.io offers ETL on an annual contract with a structure that charges based on a combination of feature requirements and platform usage.

In addition to off-the-shelf pricing below Jitterbits, Integrate.io’s ETL total cost of ownership is lower because of the following:

No integration staff requirement: Integrate.io is so easy to use that it completely eliminates the expense of hiring skilled data engineers and integration specialists. Whether it’s an executive assistant from marketing or a team member from the business intelligence department, any ETL beginner can use Integrate.io to create data integrations.
No training/certification requirement: Integrate.io’s awesome support team will quickly train your staff on how to use the platform and walk you through the process of setting up any integration – no special training required.
No on-prem hosting requirement: As a 100% cloud-native solution, Integrate.io is accessible from any internet-connected device. You will never incur additional costs to host the platform.

Here’s what Integrate.io customers are saying about price:

"Very easy to use. The pricing point is very welcoming. Once up and running, it is stable and does not require maintenance. We searched for various products, and some were either too simple or too complicated and some products were just extortionate in price. This product allowed us to start off fairly small at a reasonable price, and upscale if/when required." - Callum from DPD Group UK

“The cost of their service is well worth the accuracy, consistency, and time savings it provides. I would recommend them to anyone looking to connect data in CRM systems like Salesforce to SQL databases, and anything in between.” - Administrator in Information Tech

Integrate.io CDC Pricing

The CDC/ELT offering pricing is transaction-based, starting at $159/month for 5 million rows, with an annual commitment. Initial sync is free of charge, and this price includes unlimited connectors and a 5-minute sync guarantee.

Integrate.io API Generation Pricing

The Integrate.io API Processing offering starts at $18K/year, with additional charges for additions like advanced security. Basic support is included, with more comprehensive support available at an extra charge. Additional licenses for Dev/QA or another production instance can be purchased for rates under the first license.

Integrate.io Data Observability Pricing

The lowest-priced offering from Integrate.io is their data observability platform – it’s a freemium product with three alerts at no charge, and more alerts available for an additional fee.

User Interface

To understand the differences between Jitterbit and Integrate.io’s ease of use, let’s drill into the ETL components of both systems.

Jitterbit UI

Jitterbit offers two graphical UIs that you can use to build data integrations: Design Studio and Cloud Studio.

Design Studio

Design Studio is an on-premises integration platform with a graphical user interface that facilitates the development of ETL processes. To operate Design Studio, users need to install it on an instance of iOS or Windows – either on a physical machine or a hosted server. Most Design Studio users choose the hosted server route for better stability. Until the release of Cloud Studio, Design Studio’s on-prem requirement was one of the biggest setbacks of the Jitterbit platform. Nevertheless, many users prefer Design Studio because it’s a faster, more reliable platform.

Here’s an image of Design Studio:

(Image of Design Studio, Source: Jitterbit)

Cloud Studio

Cloud Studio is essentially a browser-based retrofit of the Design Studio platform. While Cloud Studio does liberate Jitterbit users from the need to manage on-premises software, users have complained that the platform is slow, and an overall deterioration of the original product. It’s not the smoothest running or “prettiest” cloud-based ETL platform on the block.

Here’s an image of Cloud Studio:

(Image of Cloud Studio, Source: Jitterbit)

As for Jitterbit’s ease of use, both Design Studio and Cloud Studio are graphical user interfaces with point-and-click functionality. However, it takes a considerable degree of skill to operate them. Jitterbit is not a solution that you can throw at a developer and ask him/her to “figure it out.” You need trained ETL developers and data engineers with coding experience, who are not only skilled with ETL but also experienced in using Jitterbit. Ultimately, most Jitterbit workflow pipelines require a certain degree of coding to finalize.

Here’s how one user describes Design Studio and Cloud Studio user interfaces:

“Take the time to consider the depth of scripting expertise that you might require of your Jitterbit developers. Jitterbit is focussed on the low-code developer, but some processes may require more of a 'traditional' coding approach.” - Scott D., Lead Integration Developer

“Most know Jitterbit for the data loader side, and there's a surprising amount you can do with the free version. But Jitterbit oversells what you can do declaratively with the paid tool and the documentation isn't great, especially given the price. Even their cloud agents aren't that reliable… My frustration is that you're somewhat limited with their paid cloud agents." - Steezy13312

Integrate.io ETL UI and Capabilities

Integrate.io’s graphical interface was designed so ETL beginners can quickly and intuitively master the process of building ETL pipelines without any coding knowledge or experience. After a one-hour session with an Integrate.io integration specialist, non-tech-savvy users are able to click through Integrate.io’s no-code UI to create sophisticated data integrations and transformation workflows.

Here’s a sample of Integrate.io’s no-code UI:

By empowering non-tech-savvy team members to design complex integration tasks, Integrate.io alleviates your in-house data engineers from needing to carry out tedious ETL work. Without involving a single person from your IT department, users with no ETL experience and zero coding ability can easily:

Define data fields
Name Headers
Set primary keys for consolidations
Schedule the timing of integrations
Set API parameters

Integrate.io also features over 100 prebuilt transformations so you can quickly set up transformation workflows such as ranking, cross-joining, cloning, asserting, sorting, aggregating, limiting, and more.

Creating a workflow is a simple, five-step process:

Select “Packages” from the Main Menu.
Select “New Package.”
Select the desired “Workflow” from the dropdown.
Select the transformations.
Identify the conditions for the transformations.

Integrate.io’s ease of use means that individual departments don’t have to wait for IT to respond when they need to make a last-minute change to their data integration strategies. Moreover, if you ever get confused, Integrate.io’s support team will walk you through each step of setting up your data integrations.

Here’s what users say about Integrate.io user interface:

“After evaluating 10 or so ETL providers I went with Integrate.io because their service has a relatively straightforward GUI, but also allows for a fairly sophisticated level of configuration. Most of the time the GUI is sufficient, but I'm also able to script bits and pieces and add custom SQL to handle the weird edge cases or make some of the large transfers more efficient (e.g. using a custom date field). I'm also able to do data transformations as part of the pipeline.” - Consultant in Automotive Industry

“There are mostly two types of ETL as a service on the market: one is super easy to use and can migrate your data across services and databases but lacks transformation capabilities, while the other needs full-time data engineers to operate but tailored solutions are available programmatically. Integrate.io sits in the golden middle letting analysts and engineers deploying custom transformation jobs in minutes even based on multiple data sources.” - Tamas S.

User Support

Jitterbit User Support

One of the high points of Jitterbit is its excellent customer support team. All pricing tiers receive telephone and video chat support with the following guaranteed response times:

Standard: 48-hour minimum response time.
Professional: 24-hour minimum response time
Enterprise: 6-hour minimum response time and 24-hour emergency hotline

Here’s what customers say about Jitterbit’s user support:

“The Jitterbit premier support team is top-notch too. I have put (non-critical) support tickets in only to have them responded to in an hour or two. They will set up a Webex and look into your issue, and unlike most support services out there, I've never heard them say, “That’s another platform issue. Go contact their support.” They really invest in actually solving the issue. I have no interest in looking at other systems.” - Chris K.

“When I've had questions on how to best accomplish my needs support has been very responsive and knowledgeable.” - Ryan B.

Integrate.io User Support

Integrate.io also has an excellent user support team. In fact, Integrate.io’s dedicated account service representatives are the “secret sauce” that brings the platform together. Each account receives a dedicated integration specialist. New users work closely with an integration specialist to learn the ins and outs of the platform while setting up nuanced and sophisticated data connections.

Best of all, every Integrate.io tier – whether you have a single integration or a thousand – receives unlimited phone, video, and text-based support. They are always just a phone call away.

Here’s what online reviewers say about Integrate.io’s amazing support team:

“What we love best about Integrate.io is the near real-time support we get from the team. Integrate.io's point of difference is the customer support we receive. The product itself is good. Easy to use at a high level. The people at Integrate.io are the difference – which is unusual for Cloud proposition. A nice change from dealing with a faceless machine.” - Jamie B.

"Integrate.io is an ETL and ELT platform that has helped my data team immensely. Overall the best part is how much they value my company as a client. You can’t find that in many ETL companies. I searched for many other companies, and I am happy I chose Integrate.io." - Marketing Manager

Final Thoughts on Jitterbit vs. Integrate.io

If you’ve read this far, you should have a clear understanding of how Jitterbit and Integrate.io stack up. But just in case, here’s the “too-long-didn’t-read” version of what we’ve covered:

As an all-in-one integration platform that handles a lot of different use cases – such as iPaaS, API management, app integrations, ETL, and large volume data integrations – Jitterbit could be a good match for large enterprises that can use all of these services. Just remember two things with Jitterbit: (1) You’ll need a team of skilled integration specialists with the training and expertise required to use the platform; and (2) Jitterbit’s extensive auxiliary costs often dwarf the already-hefty licensing fees associated with the platform.

Integrate.io is also an all-in-one platform, but it is available as an a la carte offering, with the ETL, CDC/ELT, API Generator, and Data Observability platforms each priced separately. Integrate.io’s ETL capability, one of the two major components where Jitterbit and Integrate.io are comparable, is also simpler and cloud-based. This means that the total cost of ownership of Integrate.io is potentially far lower than the hybrid Jitterbit offering. The modern, pure cloud-based nature of the Integrate.io offering, along with their track record of customer satisfaction via top-notch support, makes Integrate.io potentially more economical and reliable for your data integration needs.

Want to see how easy Integrate.io is to use? Click here and sign up for a free pilot of the Integrate.io platform now!

Cloud Integration

Jitterbit vs Integrate.io