head to head · open source
BillionMail vs dbt
BillionMail has 15,611 GitHub stars, 1,702 forks, 239 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. dbt has 13,851 stars, 2,567 forks, 1,534 open issues and last shipped yesterday. BillionMail leads on adoption by 13% (15,611 vs 13,851 stars). BillionMail is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; dbt is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. BillionMail 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.
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Side by side
| BillionMail | 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 BillionMail 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 BillionMail
BillionMail is an open source mail server, newsletter, and email marketing platform that runs entirely on infrastructure the operator controls. It is written in Go and released under the AGPL 3.0 license, and it lives in the self hosted email and marketing ecosystem alongside the mail transfer and delivery components it bundles, including Postfix, Dovecot, and Rspamd. The project ships as a complete stack rather than a single binary, combining a sending server, a campaign manager, and a webmail client so that one deployment covers transactional mail, promotional campaigns, and newsletters.
read the full BillionMail 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.
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Frequently asked questions
Is BillionMail or dbt more popular?
BillionMail has 15,611 GitHub stars and dbt has 13,851. BillionMail has the larger community by that measure.
Are BillionMail and dbt free?
Both are open source. BillionMail is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and dbt under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between BillionMail and dbt?
BillionMail 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, BillionMail or dbt?
Choose BillionMail 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.