12 Best Snowflake Tools: ETL, Governance & Compliance

Why do I need tools for Snowflake?

We love Snowflake. It’s a powerful tool that can unlock valuable insights in your data.  But, every company has different needs.  Maybe you need an obscure connector that Snowflake doesn’t support.  Or you need to manage complex policies to comply with Data Governance regulations.  Whatever the reason, using a 3rd party tool can help you get even more out of Snowflake.

What are Snowflake ETL Tools?

Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools provide connectors to extract data from sources like PostgreSQL, Redshift, and BigQuery.  

Once extracted, transformers clean data, convert data formats, and merge data from multiple sources.

Load tools move data into a data lake or data warehouse like Snowflake, where it can be analyzed.

What are Snowflake Governance & Compliance Tools?

Data governance and compliance tools are primarily concerned with data lineage, data access, data quality and regulatory policy management & compliance.  

Data lineage tools help you understand and track data from its source through to usage, including transmission and transformation.  Data lineage tools are useful for debugging, auditing, and demonstrating provenance.

Data access tools, also known as data security tools, ensures that only people who are authorized to access the data are able to do so.  Most data compliance regulations require data access policies.  These policies can be complex and difficult to model in Snowflake.

Data quality tools identify anomalies in your data, correct errors, ensure merged data is accurate, and much more.  

Regulatory policy management tools help your organization write, maintain, and enforce data policies.  Depending on your company’s industry and data this can be complicated and burdensome.

Regulatory compliance tools help ensure your Snowflake data is compliant with standards like SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA.  These regulations carry large penalties for non-compliance and constitute a big risk for your organization.

While Snowflake provides basic functionality in most of these areas, your team probably has unique or specific requirements that require additional tools.

What to look for in Snowflake ETL and Governance & Compliance tools

You must have a clear understanding of your overall business objectives and its constraints before researching and evaluating new tools.  Without this understanding you could waste valuable time or even choose the wrong tool for the job.  

Here are some questions to ask yourself and your team:

• What is the most important business problem you need to solve that isn’t possible given the tools your organization currently uses?
• How easily does the tool integrate with Snowflake?
• How easily does the tool integrate with your existing systems?  Does the tool have a connector for all critical systems?
• What are your data transformation needs?  Can the tool do most of the work or will additional engineering resources be necessary?
• Can the tool track data lineage (where the data came from) and metadata?
• Is the tool compliant with data privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA?

Once you’ve gathered the answers to these questions you’ll find that choosing the right tool is faster and more objective.  

To help save you time we’ve gathered the 13 best Snowflake Tools for ETL, Governance & Compliance below, along with their strengths, weaknesses, and use cases.

Best 13 Snowflake Tools in 2025 for ETL and Governance & Compliance

Matillion

Matillion’s cloud-native platform provides a complete solution to your company’s data needs.  The platform’s end-to-end ETL capabilities enable both sophisticated transformations for developers and easy to use low-code tools for simple tasks.  Its Snowpark service is particularly appealing for teams with Python expertise.

Key Features

End-to-end ETL: Matillion is a comprehensive cloud-native platform that handles every part of the extract, load, and transform process.

Data governance and compliance: Matillion’s platform supports data lineage, role-based access rules, and is SOC2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA compliant.

Low-code tools: The platform provides visual pipeline tools that are easy enough for non-developers to use.

Sophisticated transformations: Matillion has a robust, code-optional IDE, enabling your developers to build custom transformations.

Snowflake Integration: Matillion integrates with Snowflake-specific functionality and best practices.  For example, it uses the Snowpark service to executes Python scripts directly in your Snowflake account.

Other Considerations

Setup may take longer: Matillion is a powerful, sophisticated end-to-end data platform.  If your team’s environment or needs are complex then it may take longer to integrate the hybrid cloud version into your existing systems and workflows.  

Fortunately, Matillion provides a full SaaS option, plus connectors, low-code tools, and excellent documentation to minimize this time as much as possible.

Informatica

Informatica caters to enterprise customers with its comprehensive suite of data tools.  It supports both cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments, making it a great choice for both large and complex organizations.

Key Features

All-in-one solution: Informatica is a comprehensive enterprise-scale data integration and management platform.

Data governance and compliance: The platform offers robust data governance and compliance, ensuring that your data is secure and your company remains compliant.

Data transformation and cleaning:  Informatica offers sophisticated data transformation and cleansing tools, enabling your team to build exactly what it needs.

Snowflake Integration: Informatica provides deep Snowflake integration, including ETL, governance, and all Snowflake workloads.

Other Considerations

Complex setup: As a powerful enterprise product, Informatica requires significant effort to set up and integrate with your existing systems.   

Fivetran

Fivetran’s “zero-maintenance pipelines” simplify ETL and make it a solid choice if your team needs to get data from place to place quickly with minimal setup and configuration.  Its integration with DBT allows for more complex transformations, but data governance functionality is limited.

Key Features

Fast setup: Fivetran is great at moving data around and provides fully managed and automated data extraction with very little configuration needed.  This means you can get your data into Snowflake quickly and easily, unless you need complex transformations.

Data governance and compliance: The platform provides basic data lineage via metadata, plus access controls.  It is compliant with SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA.

Snowflake integration: Fivetran supports Snowflake as both a database connector and a destination.  

Other Considerations

Basic transformations: Fivetran provides quickstart transformations for basic needs, but relies on a DBT integration for more complex transformations.

Qlik Stitch

Qlik Stitch is a cloud-first data integration platform focused on simplicity and speed of setup.  

Key Features

Robust community: Stitch’s open-source Singer framework provides pre-built integrations and transformations and a thriving community of developers who build and support them.

Fast setup: Because of the robust community-built tools, Stitch is fast to get up and running.

Data governance and compliance: Stitch is compliant with SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR.  Its data access and lineage functionality is basic compared to the competition.

Snowflake Integration: Stitch supports Snowflake as a data destination.

Other Considerations

Basic transformations: For more complex transformations, Stitch requires developer effort or the use of an integration with Talend.

Apache Airflow

Apache Airflow is a powerful open source tool with extensive integrations and the ability to create complex workflows to get your team’s data in to Snowflake.  Though it requires effort to set up, it can be an excellent choice if your team is proficient in Python.

Key Features

Great general-purpose workflow tool: Apache Airflow is a powerful and flexible tool for scheduling and automating complex data flows.

Open source: Airflow comes with substantial cost savings and a robust community of support.

Snowpark Compatible: Airflow supports Snowpark, enabling your team to run Airflow models next to your Snowflake data.

Other Considerations

Engineering resources needed: Your team will need significant engineering effort to set up, configure, and maintain Apache Airflow.

Limited data governance: Airflow’s data lineage functionality is currently experimental and subject to change.

Python-focused: Airflow’s workflows are written in Python and the platform is focused on Python in general.  Your team will need to be proficient in Python to make the most of Apache Airflow.

dbt

dbt (data build tool) is an open source tool that supports version control, testing, and documentation.  dbt uses SQL-based transformations, enabling your team to use their existing skills.

Key Features

SQL transformations: DBT provides a web-based IDE so your team can write reusable SQL transformations, which are more accessible for a wide range of engineers.

Strong open source community: DBT is open source and has a thriving community associated with it.

Data governance: DBT makes data lineage easy by automatically generating documentation and providing visibility and traceability.

Snowflake Integration: DBT has been named Snowflake’s Data Integration Partner of the Year twice.  It provides a native Snowflake app, bringing all of the functionality of DBT cloud in to Snowflake.

Other Considerations

No data ingestion: Extra tools are needed for data ingestion, leading to more complexity and expense.

AWS Glue

AWS Glue is a fully managed, serverless ETL service that makes integration with the Amazon ecosystem seamless.  

Key Features

Tight AWS Integration: AWS Glue is seamlessly integrated with the AWS ecosystem.  Little effort is needed to integrate with Redshift, S3, and Lambda.

Less infrastructure: Glue automatically provisions the environment and resources needed to run your jobs and transformations, significantly reducing setup time and ongoing infrastructure maintenance.

Snowflake Integration: AWS Glue provides Snowflake data connectors and supports query pushdown.

Other Considerations

Not optimized for Snowflake: Glue is optimized for AWS products, so extra configuration is needed to integrate with Snowflake.

Vendor lock-in with AWS/Amazon: AWS Glue is difficult to use with non-AWS products and carries the associated risk of vendor lock-in.

No off-the-shelf data governance: AWS Glue requires significant effort to set up and maintain data governance and lineage.

Azure Data Factory

Azure Data Factory is a cloud-based data integration service from Microsoft, boasting tight integration with other Microsoft Azure services and extensive connectivity to both on-premise and cloud data platforms.

Key Features

Seamless Azure integration: Azure Data Factory provides easy integration with Power BI, SQL Server, and the rest of the Azure ecosystem.

Low-code pipeline designer: Building data pipelines is straightforward using Azure Data Factory’s intuitive, code-free interface.

Snowflake Integration: Azure Data Factory provides a Snowflake connector, supporting data ingestion, lookup, and light scripting in Snowflake.

Other Considerations

Data governance not included: Microsoft Purview is needed to achieve data governance goals.  

Vendor lock-in with Azure/Microsoft: Using non-Microsoft data sources is more difficult and carries the same risk of vendor lock-in as other similar products from cloud providers.

Google Cloud Dataflow

Google Cloud Dataflow is a fully managed serverless ETL service that provides a unified API for both batch and stream data processing.  It provides tight integration with other Google Cloud services.

Key Features

Integration with Google Services: Google Cloud Dataflow seamlessly integrates with Google Cloud services like BigQuery, saving valuable engineering effort.

Scalable real-time data processing: The platform uses serverless processing and dynamically rebalances tasks, making scalability automatic even for large-scale workloads.

Less infrastructure: The platform automatically provisions and scales your infrastructure, significantly reducing setup time and ongoing infrastructure maintenance.

Snowflake Integration: Google Cloud Dataflow provides a Snowflake connector, allowing you to execute stored procedures and custom SQL queries in Snowflake.

Other Considerations

Vendor lock-in with GCP/Google: Google Cloud Dataflow is more difficult to use with non-Google products and carries the associated risk of vendor lock-in.

Alation

Alation is a data catalog that enables your team to quickly find and access the data it needs.  It does this by leveraging metadata, enabling full data lineage transparency and robust data governance management.

Key Features

Data governance: Alation’s data governance tools eliminate data silos and help your team stay compliant with SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and more.  You can centralize policies, classify data, and automate compliance tasks with ease.

Data lineage: Alation makes end-to-end data lineage makes traceability easy, facilitating debugging and compliance.

Snowflake Horizon: Alation integrates with Snowflake Horizon, helping customers trust and understand their data.

Optimize Snowflake costs: Alation integrates with Peak Performance, a Snowflake Native App that optimizes your Snowflake costs and workloads.

Other Considerations

No end-to-end ETL: Alation excels at data governance and compliance but must be combined with other tools like Matillion to form a complete ETL solution.

Collibra

Collibra suite of data products is primarily focused on governance and observability.  This makes it a great add-on to Snowflake for teams with more complex needs.

Key Features

Data governance and compliance: Collibra centrally manages data governance policies that you can push down to Snowflake for on-platform enforcement.  

Data lineage: Collibra provides column-level data lineage so you get a complete picture of where your data came from and where it’s going.

Data quality: The platform looks for anomalies in your data and suggests rules for fixing them.

Snowflake Integration: Collibra provides a Snowflake connector and supports both pushdown and pullup processing methods.  Collibra’s data governance policies are evaluated at runtime, ensuring data access is restricted only to those with permission.

Other Considerations

No ETL: Collibra is focused on data governance, observability, quality, and compliance.  You’ll need another tool like Matillion to form a complete ETL solution.

Level up your Snowflake ETL and Data Governance with Matillion

As your company grows and evolves, so will your ETL and Data Governance needs.  Whether you’re bringing online new data sources, building more sophisticated transformations, or you just need to comply with new regulations, Matillion helps make Snowflake even better.

Don’t believe us?  See for yourself.

Start your free trial today and experience how Matillion simplifies complex data integrations. Ready to dig deeper? Book a demo with one of our experts to get a hands-on walkthrough of the platform and what it can do for your business and its data.