dbt Reviews & Product Details

I like best about dbt is how it brings a clean, developer‑friendly structure to analytics work. It makes modeling and transforming data feel organized and predictable, thanks to its simple SQL‑first approach and clear project layout. I also really appreciate how dbt encourages good engineering practices such as version control, testing, documentation. So the entire workflow becomes more reliable and collaborative. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike about dbt is that some parts of the workflow can feel a bit inflexible, especially when you're trying to customize how tests or models behave in more complex projects. It also relies heavily on command‑line and configuration files, which can become demanding as the project grows. On top of that, dbt doesn’t handle ingestion or real‑time needs, so user often need additional tools to complete the pipeline, which makes the setup feel less seamless. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The way it handles large amounts of data, as well as how it integrates into AWS (S3/Glue) is great. This allows me to avoid building custom pipelines which would have been very time consuming and caused additional headaches and due to its columnar database design, all of my complex query requests are processed in a timely manner which means I do not fall asleep while waiting for results. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Vacuuming Tables… seriously, I have to manually vacuum and analyze tables to keep this thing running smoothly? It looks like 2005. Managing the clusters and nodes is also a pain – it’s not true serverless. If you’re not paying close attention to the costs, they will jump up way too high. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I primarily value how dbt shifts data transformation into a software engineering workflow. By materializing code into tables and views automatically, it lets our team focus on the transformation logic rather than DDL boilerplate. The model selection syntax is incredibly efficient for running specific segments of our DAG without wasting warehouse resources.

Macros and Jinja integration have also been game-changers for modularizing our logic and reducing code repetition. I find the YAML-based unit testing to be a robust way to ensure data integrity before it reaches our BI layer. Between the two, I prefer dbt Cloud over Core because the IDE provides immediate visibility into query results and schema changes, which speeds up our development cycle.

I use it every workday. Customer support was quick and responsive when I ran into issues during the initial setup of dbt with Snowflake authentication. Implementation was also straightforward when connecting it to Snowflake, and once the connection was established, I didn’t have any ongoing issues aside from needing to reauthenticate every day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The most significant friction point is the authentication lifecycle with Snowflake. The session tokens expire frequently (often every few hours), forcing a manual re-authentication process that disrupts the flow of development.

Additionally, there is a noticeable feature gap between the versions. dbt Core lacks the native, instant result-set previewing that makes dbt Cloud so productive. Bringing a similar "live preview" or integrated results pane to the Core CLI experience would make it a much more viable option for local development. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I threw terabytes at DBT and expected the infrastructure to fail but DBT ran the distributed execution on its own with no intervention by me. The ability to run machine learning directly within SQL is strange but better than exporting to vertex.ai and dealing with cluster management myself. I also do not have to worry about cluster management as I can just write the query and wait for the results which in my opinion is very straightforward thing to do. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Billing is a trap as well as if you run a generic query without a filter the costs jump up right away which can be very annoying. I had to re-write all of my stored procedures because the syntax isn't quite like pl/sql. And I really dislike reading the logs when a model fails and/or errors occur. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One thing that I find impressive about dbt is that it promotes discipline in writing of transformations. It transformed my approach towards the way I deal with my work, as I now think twice before imposing changes. I use it on a regular basis, and it has enhanced teamwork since logic has less difficulty in reviewing and discussion. This has saved time on quick fixes and has assisted us in developing more confidence on outputs that may be shared. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I do not like about dbt is that there is a huge effect of little errors in the models. Some of them may break down under the pressure of having a few downstream pieces broken when there is a slight change. It is time consuming and can even bring several individuals into the same problem when it comes to debugging those chains. In my case, this retards progress and results in context switching which can be annoying when time lines are near. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I use dbt every day to transform raw data in our warehouse into clean, analytics ready tables and my workflow typically begins in VS Code, where I write sql models, then push them to Git for version control and run them through dbt Cloud. And overall it has also made collaboration between our team members much easier because dbt makes the whole process much more simpler. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's challenging when one change throws an entire run off track and the error messages are at best, vague. I also feel the need to defend is the handiwork of my contributor to dbt cloud. I have also encountered the overly relaxed strucure and the resulting chaotic command and environment specific configurations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Thanks to dbt, I no longer have to depend on the engineering team to manage and transform the SQL data within our warehouse. It is the first step for me in organizing, testing, and documenting the entirety of our data models. I appreciate that all of this information is in one place in version control. I can track all changes made and the details surrounding each one. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Troubleshooting complex dependencies and build errors can be a daunting task. There are occasions when a model fails and it is unclear which upstream change might be the cause. While the documentation is really good, I have found digging into a Stack Overflow or Slack thread to be the answer for some of the more obscure problems. I also find the visualization of lineage in dbt Cloud to be cumbersome. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The largest benefit of dbt to me is that it provides structure to data work. I use it regularly with the BigQuery and version control tools. The integration is comfortable and teamwork is facilitated. It did not add any delay during implementation and the feature set enables one to reuse logic rather than rewriting it. It has minimized the number of errors and saved me time on the review and updates. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The negative side about dbt is that it becomes rigid when projects expand. Minor modifications in some cases need more readjustments than anticipated, and this makes me slow down. The problems of debugging failures are not always evident, particularly to more novice team members and this has an impact on the speed of delivery. Clean source data is also used in implementation and hence when inputs are messy, it only adds more workload rather than making it easy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I appreciated most was the elimination of duplicated code that used to be spread across various scripts. This change has significantly enhanced data reliability and now lets me implement business logic directly in pure SQL. I also value how much it accelerates development, and I find the orchestration and deployment with DBT to be exceptionally straightforward. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I found the project management aspect challenging when dealing with hundreds of models, as the interface can at times be quite complicated. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like most about dbt is that it brings software engineering best practices to SQL-based data transformations, making our SQL code base maintainable at scale. It has a clear model structure like staging, intermediate, and reporting layers. It provides macros and ref macros that make logic reusable, and the dependencies are really easy to understand. I appreciate its good collaboration with Git and integration with version control. Dbt has a strong documentation background, providing an auto-generated documentation site, so everyone is aware of what's happening in the project. The initial setup of dbt is really easy thanks to its great documentation, and it's available for almost all major data warehouses. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One of the pain points is debugging and error troubleshooting. Error messages can really be vague, making it difficult to pinpoint which part of the core caused the failure. Also, large models are painful to debug. Query plan visibility inside dbt would be really helpful. Step by step execution for failed models would also be helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.