head to head · open source
Airbyte vs olake
Airbyte has 22,303 GitHub stars, 5,431 forks, 2,395 open issues and last shipped yesterday. olake has 1,574 stars, 273 forks, 178 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Airbyte leads on adoption by 1,317% (22,303 vs 1,574 stars). Airbyte is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; olake is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Airbyte has attracted 24% as many forks as stars, olake 17%. Airbyte was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (change-data-capture, 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 | olake | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 22K | ★ 1.6K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 273 |
| 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 olake if
- You want the olake feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and olake 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 olake
OLake Go OLake Go is a high performance, open source data ingestion engine for replicating databases, S3, and Kafka into Apache Iceberg (or plain Parquet). Built for scalable, real time pipelines, OLake Go provides a simple web UI and CLI used to ingest into vendor lock in free Iceberg tables supporting all the query engines/warehouses. Read the docs and benchmarks at olake.io/docs . Join our active community on Slack . [!NOTE] 🎉 OLake Fusion is now live! — Automate your Apache Iceberg Table Maintenance. Check it out here → github.com/datazip inc/olake fusion 🎉 OLake Go — Super fast Sync to Apache Iceberg…
read the full olake overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Airbyte or olake more popular?
Airbyte has 22,303 GitHub stars and olake has 1,574. Airbyte has the larger community by that measure.
Are Airbyte and olake free?
Both are open source. Airbyte has no licence declared in this registry, and olake is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Airbyte and olake?
Airbyte is written in Python and olake 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 olake?
Choose Airbyte if you want the larger community (22,303 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose olake if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.