head to head · open source
Airbyte vs seatunnel
Airbyte has 22,082 GitHub stars, 5,350 forks, 2,395 open issues and last shipped yesterday. seatunnel has 9,655 stars, 2,413 forks, 705 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Airbyte leads on adoption by 129% (22,082 vs 9,655 stars). Airbyte is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; seatunnel is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Airbyte has attracted 24% as many forks as stars, seatunnel 25%. 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-integration, 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 | seatunnel | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 22K | ★ 9.7K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.3K | ⑂ 2.4K |
| 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 seatunnel if
- You want the seatunnel feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and seatunnel 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 seatunnel
Apache SeaTunnel is a multimodal, high performance, distributed data integration tool that is capable of synchronizing vast amounts of data daily. It is an Apache Software Foundation project written in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license, with a home on the web at seatunnel.apache.org. The project has been in development for roughly nine years and has accumulated 9,652 stars and 2,407 forks on GitHub. It sits in the Data & Analytics ecosystem, specifically in data engineering and integration, and it is built around a connector driven model: sources, sinks, and transforms are configured as jobs, and tho…
read the full seatunnel overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Airbyte or seatunnel more popular?
Airbyte has 22,082 GitHub stars and seatunnel has 9,655. Airbyte has the larger community by that measure.
Are Airbyte and seatunnel free?
Both are open source. Airbyte has no licence declared in this registry, and seatunnel is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Airbyte and seatunnel?
Airbyte is written in Python and seatunnel in Java. 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 seatunnel?
Choose Airbyte if you want the larger community (22,082 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose seatunnel if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.