Boomi vs Census

Boomi is an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) from Boomi, LP, headquartered in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. Rick Nucci founded it in 2000, its cloud integration service launched in 2007, Dell bought it in 2010, and Francisco Partners and TPG acquired it from Dell in 2021 for about $4 billion. Steve Lucas has been chairman and CEO since 2022. It connects applications, data and APIs across cloud and on-premise systems for more than 30,000 customers, by its own count.

The platform covers low-code integration with a large connector library and runtimes that can run in Boomi's cloud or on your own servers, B2B/EDI, event streams, Flow for low-code apps, and managed file transfer from the 2025 Thru acquisition. API Management grew through the 2024 purchases of Mashery and APIIDA's business, Data Hub handles master data, and Data Integration (from Rivery) adds ELT and CDC. Agentstudio and Agent Control Plane build and govern AI agents with MCP tools. Pricing is a $99/month pay-as-you-go tier plus usage, or annual editions quoted by sales.

Boomi fits mid-size and large IT teams with hybrid estates of ERP, CRM and legacy systems. It is complex for business users, edition pricing is opaque, and Zapier or Make are far simpler for SaaS-to-SaaS automation. Workato targets business-led automation, while Fivetran and Matillion focus on warehouse ELT.

In March 2026 Boomi was named a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for iPaaS for the 12th year in a row, placed highest for Ability to Execute. Prototype on the 30-day trial or pay-as-you-go before negotiating an annual edition.

Census is a reverse ETL and data activation platform founded in San Francisco in 2018 and acquired by Fivetran in 2025. It syncs modeled data from cloud warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks and Redshift into the business tools teams use every day, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Braze, Marketo and ad platforms, so that sales, marketing and support act on the same numbers as the data team.

Beyond plain syncs, Census offers Audience Hub, a visual segment builder for marketers, entity resolution to unify customer identities in the warehouse, observability with alerts and sync history, and tight dbt integration so models can be synced directly. More than 200 destinations are supported. Pricing now follows the Fivetran model: a free plan includes 3,500 monthly active rows for activations, while Standard, Enterprise and Business Critical plans are usage-based and billed on monthly active rows, so cost grows with the volume of data synced.

Census suits companies that already have a warehouse and a data team and want to activate that data without building custom pipelines. It is of little use without a warehouse, and since joining Fivetran its roadmap is increasingly tied to Fivetran's platform. Hightouch is the closest competitor and has expanded further into a composable CDP, while Segment and RudderStack combine event collection with activation.