Choosing an ETL Tool in 2026

As the founder of Dark Seahorses , a new agency that provides data engineering and analysis services to small businesses, I had the opportunity to survey the current ETL (extract, transform, load) landscape in 2026 and pick the best tool out there for us. When picking any tool, it’s important to start with your vision for where the marketplace is heading and how you think you can add value to that. Only then can you can see clearly what tools fit with that vision. What it comes to ETL, I see a marketplace that is heading towards customization, and as an agency it is our job to try to deliver that in a way that scales for us and our clients. Why ETL Will Become More and More Customized Previously, a lot of data engineering was about piping data from one predictable source to another limited number of destination databases / data warehouses. This led to several companies succeeding in making connector platforms that provided these pipes in a low or no-code interface. This freed up develo