head to head · open source
Billion Mail vs dbt
Billion Mail has 15,611 GitHub stars, 1,702 forks, 236 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. dbt has 13,851 stars, 2,567 forks, 1,534 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Billion Mail leads on adoption by 13% (15,611 vs 13,851 stars). Billion Mail is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; dbt is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Billion Mail has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, dbt 19%. dbt was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Billion Mail | dbt | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 14K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-06-11 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 2.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Billion Mail if
- You weight community size — 16K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick dbt if
- You want the dbt 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 dbt fits your workflow better
About Billion Mail
BillionMail is an open source mail server and email marketing platform written in Go and released under the AGPL 3.0 license. It lives in the self hosted email ecosystem and is described as a solution for newsletters, promotional emails, and transactional messages. The project combines mail server topics such as Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd, and SMTP with campaign features such as customer management, analytics, templates, and sending control.
read the full Billion Mail overview →
About dbt
dbt is an open source data transformation framework that lets data analysts and engineers transform their data using the same practices software engineers use to build applications, and it is aimed at analytics teams that model data inside a warehouse.
More in Business Software
Related comparisons
More Marketing & Customer Engagement projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Marketing & Customer Engagement field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Billion Mail or dbt more popular?
Billion Mail has 15,611 GitHub stars and dbt has 13,851. Billion Mail has the larger community by that measure.
Are Billion Mail and dbt free?
Both are open source. Billion Mail is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and dbt under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Billion Mail and dbt?
Billion Mail is written in Go and dbt 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, Billion Mail or dbt?
Choose Billion Mail if you want the larger community (15,611 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose dbt if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.