Grouparoo vs. Census

How Grouparoo is different (and better) than Census

Census is a SaaS-based data syncing tool that started in 2018.

Grouparoo is a newer entrant, having started in early 2020, and is also a data syncing tool built for the modern data stack. Here’s a deeper look into how Grouparoo is different from Census.

🚀 Reverse ETL powered by code

Both Grouparoo and Census are Reverse ETL tools, but only Grouparoo was designed to fit into your existing engineering workflow. Grouparoo is powered by configuration files that you can generate and test locally, and then deploy with git - just like you deploy dbt projects today. Being open source, Grouparoo can be run within your firewall or in our hosted cloud.

Easily define records, no matter your data.

Grouparoo's queryable data structure makes it easy to create records. You can configure customer records from the developer UI on our community edition and check it into git, or straight from the app UI with our enterprise product.

📀 Multiple Sources

Census requires that all of your data already be normalized in into a single source - your data warehouse. Grouparoo works great with data warehouses, but we also know that your business is still growing, and not all of your data has been brought into your data warehouse and is regularly updated. What about the data in your product database or that spreadsheet? Grouparoo’s library of sources is ready to help everyone, from the data warehouse engineer to the scrappy growth engineer, use their data, wherever it lives.

Connect your customer records to all your SaaS tools

With the records and properties you’ve defined in Grouparoo, you can then sync that data to Mailchimp and other tools that your team uses.

🧑‍💻 Open source

One major difference between Census and Grouparoo is that Grouparoo is open source (MPL v2.0 licensed), and available for anyone in the world to download and give it a try. Given our open source approach, Grouparoo is really focused on making the developer experience as easy as possible. All of your customer data can stay within your own virtual private cloud, so you have complete control.

Try it free. We’re open source

📈 SQL-based vs. web-based

In Census, the primary method for building your models and querying your data sources is with SQL. That’s great for folks who know SQL, but many aren’t familiar with SQL or would prefer a no-code or low-code approach. Grouparoo’s enterprise product allows people to define Record Properties in our web-UI without having to write SQL queries. Once your Grouparoo instance is connected to a source, you can start to define Properties and Groups in the UI. For folks who are comfortable with code though, you can also configure your Grouparoo instance locally with our developer UI, so your team has flexibility across different skill levels.

💰 Cost

Another appealing attribute of Grouparoo is cost. Grouparoo is free to try, and if you use our Community-edition and self-host it, it’s free for you to use forever. There also isn’t a limit to the depth of the integrations. Census’s starter pricing, on the other-hand, limits the number fields you can send to an integration.

Free and Easy to Install

Try Grouparoo on your computer today or install it on your company’s servers. Your data stays private on your servers. No usage or storage limits.