head to head · open source
Airbyte vs duckle
Airbyte has 22,303 GitHub stars, 5,431 forks, 2,395 open issues and last shipped yesterday. duckle has 1,546 stars, 120 forks, 79 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Airbyte leads on adoption by 1,343% (22,303 vs 1,546 stars). Airbyte is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; duckle is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Airbyte has attracted 24% as many forks as stars, duckle 8%. Airbyte was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (data-engineering, data-integration, data-pipeline, elt), 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 | duckle | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 22K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 120 |
| 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 duckle if
- You want the duckle feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and duckle fits your workflow better
About Airbyte
Open source data movement for ELT pipelines and AI agents — from APIs, databases & files to warehouses, lakes, and AI applications We believe that only an open source solution to data movement can cover the long tail of data sources while empowering data engineers to customize existing connectors. Our ultimate vision is to help you move data from any source to any destination — whether that destination is a data warehouse, a data lake, or an AI agent. Airbyte provides a catalog of 600+ connectors for APIs, databases, data warehouses, data lakes, and AI applications. Screenshot taken from Airbyte Cloud . Pick the…
read the full Airbyte overview →
About duckle
Pipelines you own. Author and deploy to your servers or cloud. Duckle is an open source ETL platform for teams who want their pipelines running on their own infrastructure. Author on a canvas, in Python or in SQL, then ship the same file to your own server or cloud account: duckle runner serve runs it headless on a schedule, in Docker or on a box you own, with a web console, roles and an audit trail. Every pipeline is one file in git, so it outlives whoever wrote it. It compiles to SQL on DuckDB and uses every core you give the box, so a bigger instance is a faster pipeline: 96 million rows out of Postgres to…
read the full duckle overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Airbyte or duckle more popular?
Airbyte has 22,303 GitHub stars and duckle has 1,546. Airbyte has the larger community by that measure.
Are Airbyte and duckle free?
Both are open source. Airbyte has no licence declared in this registry, and duckle is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Airbyte and duckle?
Airbyte is written in Python and duckle in Rust. 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 duckle?
Choose Airbyte if you want the larger community (22,303 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose duckle if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.