RudderStack Transformations: Move Faster and Build Data Trust

Over 75% of all RudderStack customers use Transformations to ship projects faster, secure and build trust in data, and quickly adapt to changing business needs.

Transformations gives you more flexibility, security, and control over your data, and now has powerful new features including:

Python Transformations (including Libraries and Transformations API)
Transformation Templates
Device Mode Transformations

To celebrate these releases, we’re inviting you to join our first ever community competition, the RudderStack Transformations Challenge.

Submit a Transformation to our open source library for a chance to win the $1,000 cash grand prize, a feature on our blog, and more. More details below.

What is RudderStack Transformations?

Transformations is a code based feature that lets you manipulate and enrich your event payloads in real-time. You can apply Transformations using JavaScript and Python to easily:

Transform payload formats, keys, and values
Filter data based on specific criteria
Enrich events with additional information from external sources and APIs

Transformations has a simplified architecture that uses the same mechanism as the underlying destination-specific transformers, making it just as reliable, performant, and robust.

You can apply transformations to your data before it reaches its destination, and on a destination-by-destination basis. This gives teams and tools fully enriched and formatted data across their stack, and the flexibility to meet changing needs without waiting on a release cycle or new deployment.

Why you’ll love Transformations

Build and ship data projects faster

Transformations reduces the time and effort required to accomplish a wide variety of use cases.

A good example is data enrichment:

What if Marketing wants to enrich purchase events with geolocation or AI data?
What if Sales wants to complete customer records from a 3rd-party data source?

Without Transformations, you’ll likely find yourself running multiple time-consuming batch jobs to pull the dataset, update and enrich it, then push it back to the original source for the downstream team. Meanwhile, Sales and Marketing are wondering why their seemingly simple request is taking hours, if not days to complete.

With Transformations, that laborious push-pull process is a thing of the past. You can enrich event payloads via APIs in real-time before they reach the destination, so your downstream teams get fully enriched data the moment it arrives.

Check out how to enrich leads in Salesforce with Clearbit data for a concrete example of the power of Transformations.

Secure and build trust in data

Quickly fix bad data (even during code freezes!)

Transformations helps you maintain high data quality by enabling data fixes in minutes, not weeks.

Inaccurate, stale, or dirty data lead to poor business decisions. With Transformations, you can fix bad data before it becomes problematic by filtering or correcting invalid event payloads in real-time.

You don't even have to worry about working with developers to update event instrumentation or waiting for code freezes to end, because Transformations runs in RudderStack's pipelines.

Easily manage PII and privacy compliance

Managing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and maintaining security and compliance is more important than ever.

With Transformations, you can easily mask or remove sensitive information from event payloads based on specific criteria, ensuring that only compliant information is shared with downstream systems.

This not only simplifies compliance with privacy and data regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA, but helps build trust with your customers and security teams.

Hash PII, Anonymize IP, block events and more using our Transformations Templates.

Quickly adapt to changing business and data needs

Transformations helps you quickly customize your data and integrations so you can easily adapt to changing business needs.

You can use Transformations to create custom sources and integrations—without relying on external vendors or waiting for product updates from existing tools.

For example, your marketing team wants to send data to a new engagement platform that’s not yet supported by RudderStack out-of-the-box. Using Transformations, you can write custom code to adapt existing events, then send them directly to the new tool’s API via RudderStack’s webhook destination.

Here’s the how-to guide on creating custom source integrations with Webhooks and Transformations.

Additionally, the Transformations API makes it quicker and easier for data engineers to create, update, test and publish Transformations in a version controlled development or production environment. Learn more about the Transformations API in our docs.

The latest Transformations features

Python Transformations

You can now write transformations code in Python. If Python is your language of choice, you no longer have to use JavaScript to transform your event data.

While Python is the go-to choice for many data teams, it’s also especially useful for data science and machine learning use cases.

Learn more about Python Transformations in the docs.

Python is also now available for our Transformations Libraries, and soon with our Transformations API.

Transformations Templates

Transforming data just got faster. You can now use prebuilt transformations and apply them to a wide and growing variety of common use cases. Available now in JavaScript, and soon Python.

Learn more about Transformations Templates in the docs.

Device Mode Transformations

With Device Mode Transformations, you can transform data being sent to downstream integrations running in device mode. When destination integrations are set up in device mode, RudderStack loads that tool's native SDK asynchronously and sends event data directly to the destination from the device itself (i.e., from the browser or mobile app).

Device Mode Transformations are incredibly helpful for use cases like customizing ad platform conversions or using real-time event data to customize native experiences.

Coming soon! Device Mode Transformations will have its own blog post with use cases coming soon, so stay tuned.