At Fivetran, our mission has always been to make access to data as simple, secure, and reliable as electricity. We started by solving one of the hardest parts of the data journey: building and maintaining the pipelines that move raw data from source systems into the warehouse, with zero maintenance and complete trust in the output. Over the years, we’ve expanded that vision — adding new sources, deployment models, destinations, and transformation capabilities.

Fivetran’s agreement to acquire Census marks a major step forward in that journey. Census will extend our platform beyond ingestion and transformation, so Fivetran customers will be able to reliably move governed data to the applications where decisions get made.

Census’s reverse ETL engine stands out not just for its reliability and speed, but for how seamlessly it handles schema changes and integrates with modern data technologies. Other tools in the market offer reverse ETL, but many require heavy setup or ongoing tuning to stay reliable at scale. I believe Census is the best reverse ETL tool in the market. Census stood out for how thoughtfully it handled performance, schema volatility, and governance — making it a natural fit for Fivetran’s standards of simplicity, automation, and trust.

Beyond shared product principles, Fivetran and Census share a deep-rooted history that dates back to the founding days of both companies. As each company has scaled, so has our partnership—reflected in hundreds of joint customers and strong alignment across our executive teams. This agreement is about more than the integration of two products; it's the unification of a shared vision and culture, anchored in our commitment to delivering even greater value for our customers.

What this means for our customers

Customers will be able to sync modeled, trusted data delivered by Fivetran into their data platform into operational tools like Salesforce, Marketo, Zendesk, and HubSpot — all with automation and observability. This is key to closing the loop between analytics and action — transforming insights into outcomes in the systems that drive customer engagement, sales, and operations.

In a perfect world, Fivetran would have Reverse ETL and we could just log into one platform, we could do ETL and reverse ETL in one place. That would be our preference.
— VP of Advanced Analytics at a global insurance brand

Census carries forward Fivetran’s philosophy of ease and simplicity into the activation layer, while maintaining the governance, automation, and reliability our customers expect from Fivetran. Customers like Canva, one of our joint customers, deliver real-time customer 360 use cases—like personalized marketing, churn prevention, and lifecycle engagement—without needing custom code or ongoing maintenance. With over 170 million monthly users and more than 200 terabytes of data in Snowflake, Canva needed a way to move quickly from insight to action. Fivetran helped them ingest and model their data; Census helped them activate it—pushing enriched segments into Braze to personalize customer experiences.

The results: a 33% increase in email open rates, 2.5% lift in platform engagement, over $200,000 saved annually in engineering time, and the ability to create new audiences in under five minutes. Together, we helped Canva turn data into results.

Reverse ETL, done right

Reverse ETL may sound simple—move data out of the warehouse and into a SaaS tool—but it presents its own set of engineering challenges compared to ingestion pipelines.

Schema drift and API changes: SaaS application schemas are constantly evolving, and APIs often change with little notice. Census built a specialized change detection algorithm to detect changes in the warehouse and sync only what’s needed—reliably and incrementally.

Performance and low latency: Census supports single second latency for streaming use cases with Live Syncs and near real-time syncs for all others - ensuring business applications are powered by the latest, most accurate data.

We’ve been waiting for this moment for years and it’s finally here. With Census Live Syncs, reverse ETL on real-time data is now a reality. Customers can now activate their real-time insights on a zero latency data infrastructure, without the complex engineering work needed to build it. It's hard to overstate how fast this new sync engine is.
— Nikhil Benesch, Co-Founder and CTO, Materialize

Governance and extensibility: Census keeps data in the customer’s warehouse by default and processes it securely, with compliance support across SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and more. It supports role-based access control, audit logs, and APIs, enabling interoperability with tooling across the data stack.

These problems are not trivial. Building a reverse ETL platform that can handle many destinations and complex enterprise requirements takes time and real product focus. Census’s team approached it the same way we do at Fivetran—by automating complexity and designing for performance, reliability, and data security from day one. In addition, Census shares Fivetran’s focus on trusted data which is critical when moving data into the applications that run your business—providing extensive observability is critical to ensuring you can verify data accuracy, catch anomalies early, and maintain trust in the workflows that drive real-time business decisions.

Learn more about what this means for the industry.