Airbyte vs dbt
Zero of fourteen models named Airbyte first on the direct prompt; zero named dbt. Airbyte was named by fourteen of the fourteen models and dbt by thirteen and Airbyte carries 75 labels and dbt 42, so the shares are not directly comparable.
Named in two categories this edition.
Named in six categories this edition.
Share is the count of first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts over all fourteen models, for a mid-market B2B company; rank is within the category; every quote names the model and the prompt it came from. Both figures come from the ETL and ELT page.
By framing
AirbyteFirst choices, of fourteen modelsdbt
Across every category in the November 2026 Edition, Airbyte and dbt were named in the same answer ninety-two times, of the 189 answers naming Airbyte and the 125 naming dbt. In those answers dbt took the first choice six times and Airbyte thirty.
Every model, every framing
| Model | Direct | Paraphrase | Comparative | Budget-constrained | Scale-constrained | Negative |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | | | ||||
| GPT-5.4 mini | | | | | ||
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | | | | | | |
| Perplexity Sonar | | | | | | |
| Grok 4.20 | | | | | | |
| Mistral Small | | | | |||
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | | | | | | |
| Llama 4 Maverick | | | ||||
| Qwen 3.7 Flash | | | | | | |
| Kimi K2 | | | | | | |
| GLM 4.7 FlashX | | | | | | |
| MiniMax M2.5 | | | | | ||
| GPT-6 Luna | | | | | ||
| Muse Glimmer 30B | | | | |
Airbyte dbt first choice named as an alternative argued againstblank: not namedEach cell is one answer, Airbyte on the left and dbt on the right.The direct prompt
Neither was the first choice, one was named
11 of 14 modelsThe answer put something else first and named one of the two as an alternative.Neither was named
3 of 14 modelsThe answer made no first choice from these two in this category.Bold names in an answer are the products the judge labeled a first choice; a model naming several gives each of them that label. The full answer text for every row is in the record.
By buyer segment
Airbyte35%#1 of 15dbt2%#6 of 15dbt6%#4 of 14Airbyte2%#7 of 14What the models said about Airbyte
Every negative label with a quote, up to three, then the highest-weighted positives, up to three. Six of seven in this category shown.
“infrastructure, upgrades, monitoring, connector fixes, and incident response create substantial engineering costs” Perplexity Sonar · negative prompt · soft negative
“Self-Hosted Airbyte/OSS ... this path is often discouraged for startups and mid-market companies” Qwen 3.7 Flash · negative prompt · soft negative
“These can be good products, but usage-based billing may rise sharply with data volume” Perplexity Sonar · negative prompt · soft negative
“Most mid-market teams land on a combination like Fivetran or Airbyte (ingestion) + dbt (transformation) + an orchestrator (Airflow/Dagster)” DeepSeek V4 Flash · scale prompt · first choice
“Go with Airbyte Cloud + dbt Cloud + BigQuery/Snowflake if you want the best balance of cost efficiency, scalability, and flexibility.” Gemini 3.5 Flash · paraphrase prompt · first choice
“Best default on a tight budget: Airbyte Core, if your team can host and maintain it. It's free and open source, with 600+ connectors” GPT-6 Luna · budget prompt · first choice
What the models said about dbt
Every negative label with a quote, up to three, then the highest-weighted positives, up to three. Five of five in this category shown.
“dbt's recent model-based pricing controversies, which have drawn significant criticism” DeepSeek V4 Flash · negative prompt · soft negative
“Not a general-purpose extraction and loading tool.” GPT-6 Luna · comparative prompt · soft negative
“recommend Cloud-Native ELT tools (like Fivetran, Airbyte, or dbt)” GLM 4.7 FlashX · negative prompt · first choice
“Choose Fivetran + dbt if you want a modern, low-maintenance ELT stack” Gemini 3.5 Flash · comparative prompt · first choice
“Transform: Use dbt to build tested, documented SQL models” GPT-6 Luna · paraphrase prompt · first choice
Comparisons are drawn for the top eight products in each category, each against each. The output is the models' output; nothing here is a recommendation by the index.