Happy Valley

Airbyte vs Hookdeck

Airbyte and Hookdeck are both data integration & ETL tools aimed at developers and small businesses. Airbyte costs less, from $20/mo versus $39/mo for Hookdeck. Both have a free plan.

Airbyte

Open-source data movement with 600+ connectors

Hookdeck

Event gateway that queues, routes and retries inbound webhooks

PricingOpen source · $20Freemium · $39
Starting price$20/mo$39/mo
Free planYesYes
Free trial14 days—
Built forDevelopers, Small businessesDevelopers, Small businesses, Enterprise
Platformswebweb
CountryUS · 2020CA
Rating——

Choose Airbyte if

Data teams who want connector breadth and control at lower cost and can manage some operations.

  • Open source with huge connector catalog
  • Build custom connectors quickly
  • Lower cost than Fivetran at volume

Look elsewhere if: Teams wanting fully managed, zero-maintenance pipelines (Fivetran).

Choose Hookdeck if

Engineering teams that depend on third-party webhooks and want queuing, retries and observability without building it themselves.

  • Free Developer plan with 10,000 events a month
  • Works with any framework, with no SDK required
  • Retries are included in event pricing

Look elsewhere if: Teams that only need a local tunnel or a general workflow automation tool (ngrok, Pipedream).

Airbyte vs Hookdeck pricing

Airbyte

  • Core (self-hosted)$0Open-source edition, self-managed
  • Standard$20/mo5 credits included, extra credits $5; 1-hr syncs
  • Plus$189/mo40 credits; 15-min syncs, SSO, 2 workspaces
  • ProCustomCapacity-based; 5-min syncs, premium support
  • Enterprise FlexCustomHybrid or in-boundary deployment

Hookdeck

  • Developer$010,000 events/mo, 3-day retention, 1 user
  • Team$39/moFrom $39; pay-as-you-go events, 7-day retention, unlimited users
  • Growth$499/moFrom $499; 30-day retention, SSO/SCIM, HIPAA, uptime SLA
  • EnterpriseCustomCustom retention, SLAs and contracts, Slack Connect support

Airbyte · Key features

  • 600+ connectors with certified and community tiers
  • No-code Connector Builder and AI connector generation
  • Incremental sync, CDC and schema change handling
  • Self-hosted (Docker, Kubernetes) or Cloud
  • dbt integration and orchestration hooks (Airflow, Dagster)
  • PyAirbyte for running connectors in Python

Cons

  • Community connector quality varies
  • Self-hosting requires infrastructure skills
  • Cloud pricing can be hard to forecast

Hookdeck · Key features

  • Signature verification and authentication for incoming webhooks
  • Durable queues with retries and exponential backoff
  • Filters, routing, fan-out, deduplication and JavaScript transformations
  • Issues, alerts to Slack, Teams or PagerDuty, and bulk replay
  • CLI that forwards events to a local server for development
  • Terraform provider and API for configuration as code

Cons

  • Event and throughput metering makes high volume costly
  • Only 5 events per second per destination included before add-ons
  • SSO, SCIM and HIPAA require the $499 Growth plan

Airbyte vs Hookdeck: FAQ

Which is cheaper, Airbyte or Hookdeck?

Airbyte starts at $20/mo and Hookdeck at $39/mo. Both prices are checked on the vendors' own pricing pages.

Do Airbyte and Hookdeck have a free plan?

Yes, both Airbyte and Hookdeck have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.

Not sure yet?