head to head · open source
Airbyte vs sycamore
Airbyte has 22,303 GitHub stars, 5,431 forks, 2,395 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sycamore has 605 stars, 71 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Airbyte leads on adoption by 3,586% (22,303 vs 605 stars). Airbyte is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; sycamore is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Airbyte has attracted 24% as many forks as stars, sycamore 12%. Airbyte was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | sycamore | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 22K | ★ 605 |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 71 |
| 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 sycamore if
- You want the sycamore feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and sycamore 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 sycamore
Sycamore is an open source, AI powered document processing engine for ETL, RAG, LLM based applications, and analytics on unstructured data. Sycamore can partition and enrich a wide range of document types including reports, presentations, transcripts, manuals, and more. It can analyze and chunk complex documents such as PDFs and images with embedded tables, figures, graphs, and other infographics. Check out an example notebook. For processing documents, Sycamore leverages Aryn DocParse (formerly known as the Aryn Partitioning Service), a serverless, GPU powered API for segmenting and labeling documents, doing…
read the full sycamore overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Airbyte or sycamore more popular?
Airbyte has 22,303 GitHub stars and sycamore has 605. Airbyte has the larger community by that measure.
Are Airbyte and sycamore free?
Both are open source. Airbyte has no licence declared in this registry, and sycamore is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Airbyte and sycamore?
Airbyte is written in Python and sycamore in Python. 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 sycamore?
Choose Airbyte if you want the larger community (22,303 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose sycamore if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.