Census vs Hightouch

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.

Hightouch is a data activation platform from San Francisco that started as a reverse ETL tool and grew into a composable customer data platform. It syncs data from warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks and Redshift to more than 250 destinations, including CRMs, marketing automation, support tools and ad platforms, and keeps the warehouse as the single source of truth instead of copying data into a separate CDP.

For marketers, Customer Studio provides a no-code audience builder over warehouse data, with identity resolution, journeys and a match booster that improves match rates on ad platforms. AI Decisioning learns which message, offer and timing works for each customer and adjusts campaigns accordingly. Data teams get observability, alerting, version control and dbt integration. A free Basic Reverse ETL tier allows up to two active syncs, while the Composable CDP and Agentic Marketing Platform plans use custom, usage-based pricing.

Hightouch fits companies with a mature warehouse and a data team that want marketing and sales to act on trusted data. It is a poor fit for teams without a warehouse, and costs scale with usage and features. Census, now part of Fivetran, is the closest reverse ETL competitor, while Segment and mParticle are traditional CDPs that collect events and store profiles themselves.