head to head · open source
Airbyte vs sling-cli
Airbyte has 22,303 GitHub stars, 5,431 forks, 2,395 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sling-cli has 919 stars, 87 forks, 38 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Airbyte leads on adoption by 2,327% (22,303 vs 919 stars). Airbyte is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; sling-cli is written in Go under GPL-3.0. Airbyte has attracted 24% as many forks as stars, sling-cli 9%. Airbyte was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (elt, etl), 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 | sling-cli | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 22K | ★ 919 |
| License | Custom / other | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 87 |
| 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 sling-cli if
- You want the sling-cli feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and sling-cli 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 sling-cli
Slings from a data source to a data target. See docs.slingdata.io for more details. Sling is a passion project turned into a free CLI Product which offers an easy solution to create and maintain small to medium volume data pipelines using the Extract & Load (EL) approach. It focuses on data movement between: Database to Database File System to Database Database to File System API to Database API to File System Some key features: Single Binary deployment (built with Go). See installation page. Use Custom SQL as a stream: src stream='select from my table where col1 10' Manage / View / Test / Discover your…
read the full sling-cli overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Airbyte or sling-cli more popular?
Airbyte has 22,303 GitHub stars and sling-cli has 919. Airbyte has the larger community by that measure.
Are Airbyte and sling-cli free?
Both are open source. Airbyte has no licence declared in this registry, and sling-cli is licensed under GPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Airbyte and sling-cli?
Airbyte is written in Python and sling-cli 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 sling-cli?
Choose Airbyte if you want the larger community (22,303 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose sling-cli if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.