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) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Validated through Google using a business email account
Organic review. This review was written entirely without invitation or incentive from G2, a seller, or an affiliate.
