head to head · open source
Airbyte vs CloudQuery
Airbyte has 22,082 GitHub stars, 5,350 forks, 2,395 open issues and last shipped yesterday. CloudQuery has 6,520 stars, 558 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Airbyte leads on adoption by 239% (22,082 vs 6,520 stars). Airbyte is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; CloudQuery is written in Go under MPL-2.0. Airbyte has attracted 24% as many forks as stars, CloudQuery 9%. Airbyte was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 7 topic tags (bigquery, data, data-analysis, data-collection), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Airbyte | CloudQuery | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 22K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | Custom / other | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.3K | ⑂ 558 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Airbyte if
- You weight community size — 22K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick CloudQuery if
- You want the CloudQuery feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and CloudQuery fits your workflow better
About Airbyte
Airbyte open source data movement project. It lives in data engineering and data integration ecosystem. It moves data from APIs, databases, and files into warehouses, data lakes, and AI applications. It supports ELT and ETL pipelines. It also supports AI agents needing business data.
read the full Airbyte overview →
About CloudQuery
CloudQuery is an open source, Go based cloud asset inventory and ELT tool, licensed under MPL 2.0, that syncs metadata from AWS, Azure, GCP, and more than 70 cloud and SaaS sources into a data warehouse so platform, security, and FinOps teams can query it with SQL.
read the full CloudQuery overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Airbyte or CloudQuery more popular?
Airbyte has 22,082 GitHub stars and CloudQuery has 6,520. Airbyte has the larger community by that measure.
Are Airbyte and CloudQuery free?
Both are open source. Airbyte has no licence declared in this registry, and CloudQuery is licensed under MPL-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Airbyte and CloudQuery?
Airbyte is written in Python and CloudQuery in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Airbyte or CloudQuery?
Choose Airbyte if you want the larger community (22,082 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose CloudQuery if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.