Census vs Stitch

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.

Stitch is a cloud ELT service that replicates data from SaaS applications and databases into data warehouses. It started in 2016 as a spin-off from RJMetrics, was acquired by Talend in 2018, and became part of Qlik when Qlik acquired Talend in 2023. Stitch also created Singer, the open-source specification for writing data extraction taps and targets.

You pick a source such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Ads, Shopify, MySQL or PostgreSQL, choose tables and fields, set a replication schedule, and Stitch loads the data into destinations including Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift and PostgreSQL. It supports more than 130 sources, incremental replication and detailed logs, and teams can add custom sources with Singer taps. Pricing is based on rows replicated per month across Standard, Advanced and Premium plans, which keeps costs fairly predictable for small and medium volumes. Transformations are expected to happen in the warehouse, typically with dbt.

Stitch fits small data teams that need simple, reliable loading for common sources without managing infrastructure. Product development has slowed since the acquisitions, the connector catalogue is smaller than rivals, real-time and change data capture options are limited, and support quality varies. Fivetran offers the broadest managed connector library at a higher price, Airbyte is open source with a large connector catalogue, and Qlik positions its Talend products for larger enterprise integration needs.