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dbt pros and cons

Vendor: dbt Labs
3.9 out of 5

Pros & Cons summary

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

dbt enables faster data pipeline creation, taking weeks instead of months, while utilizing existing in-house skills.
Operational efficiency, improved data quality, and governance are achieved through modular SQL and version controlling, reducing data duplication and errors.
Since migrating from SSIS, dbt reduces full refresh time to around four hours, significantly minimizing downtime.
Developers find the ease of development and code capabilities to be the most useful features of dbt.
Writing everything in code is considered dbt's most desirable feature.

CONS

Users find dbt's co-pilot not to be effective, leading teams to switch to alternatives like GitHub.
Dbt experiences outages, causing stability concerns, so improvements are needed.
License costs for dbt may not be feasible for small companies, which might opt for more affordable tools.
Migration of code to Git and GitHub can fail, causing confusion for developers during handovers.
Each upgrade poses risks as it is uncertain if previous workarounds will work in new versions.
 

dbt Pros review quotes

Ninad Magdum - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Happiest Minds Technologies
Aug 13, 2024
The product is developer-friendly.
JohnnyHuang - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data & AI engineering at One NZ
Dec 2, 2025
dbt has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to create our data pipelines much faster, going from ingestion of data to creating a data product in weeks instead of months, and we can do it in-house with the skillset we already have.
reviewer2780388 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
Dec 10, 2025
There is operational efficiency achieved, and data quality and governance have also been achieved with modular SQL and version controlling, which reduced duplication of data and data errors.
Learn what your peers think about dbt. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Shubham-Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Projects at Cognizant
Jan 22, 2026
Since we migrated from SSIS to dbt model architecture, it takes around four hours only to complete a full refresh, and the client is now happy because our downtime was drastically reduced when we perform a complete refresh of the data.
reviewer2803965 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Software Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Feb 20, 2026
From a developer point of view, I find the ease of development and the code to be the most useful capabilities of dbt.
AS
Principal Data Engineer at Integrant, Inc.
Mar 2, 2026
I would say the best feature or the most desirable feature for dbt is the ability to write everything in code.
 

dbt Cons review quotes

Ninad Magdum - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Happiest Minds Technologies
Aug 13, 2024
The solution must add more Python-based implementations.
JohnnyHuang - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data & AI engineering at One NZ
Dec 2, 2025
dbt can be improved as I find the co-pilot in dbt is not very good, and my team has tried using it but opted to move off it and use other co-pilots such as GitHub.
reviewer2780388 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
Dec 10, 2025
Dbt is not as stable as preferred, as it has had a few outages in the current year itself, so improvement should be made in the outages section as it is not stable.
Learn what your peers think about dbt. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Shubham-Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Projects at Cognizant
Jan 22, 2026
Since dbt has a license cost, if a company is small and does not have much budget, they can explore other tools because there are other tools that provide the same functionality at a lower cost.
reviewer2803965 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Software Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Feb 20, 2026
If I needed to name a few areas for improvement, I would mention the migration of code to Git and GitHub, which sometimes fails and can be confusing for developers during handover.
AS
Principal Data Engineer at Integrant, Inc.
Mar 2, 2026
Every upgrade is a little bit of a risk for us because we do not know if the workarounds that we developed will be available for the next version.