You can use KNIME as a basic ETL tool but it’s no replacement for talend and the like at all. talend for example can read out database changes directly from the system WAL (write-ahead log, a low level thing in databases usually not user-accessible and certainly not via knime). This means a clean ETL solution. With knime you can only work with version and date columns or triggers to set up an ETL solution. Will works just fine for some use-cases, not for others.