head to head · open source
Cube vs duckle
Cube has 21,147 GitHub stars, 2,179 forks, 1,185 open issues and last shipped yesterday. duckle has 1,546 stars, 120 forks, 79 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Cube leads on adoption by 1,268% (21,147 vs 1,546 stars). Cube is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; duckle is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Cube has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, duckle 8%. Cube 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
| Cube | duckle | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 120 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Cube if
- You weight community size — 21K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick duckle if
- You want the duckle 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 duckle fits your workflow better
About Cube
Website • Docs • Examples • Blog • Slack • X Cube Core is the open source semantic layer. Define metrics, dimensions, joins, and access rules once in code, then expose them through SQL, REST, and GraphQL APIs to anything downstream — BI tools, custom applications, or AI agents. Cube Core is headless: it doesn't ship a UI, so you can build the analytics experience that fits your product. Cube Core works with all SQL data sources, including cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery; query engines like Presto and Amazon Athena; and application databases like Postgres. It has a built in…
About duckle
Pipelines you own. Author and deploy to your servers or cloud. Duckle is an open source ETL platform for teams who want their pipelines running on their own infrastructure. Author on a canvas, in Python or in SQL, then ship the same file to your own server or cloud account: duckle runner serve runs it headless on a schedule, in Docker or on a box you own, with a web console, roles and an audit trail. Every pipeline is one file in git, so it outlives whoever wrote it. It compiles to SQL on DuckDB and uses every core you give the box, so a bigger instance is a faster pipeline: 96 million rows out of Postgres to…
read the full duckle overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cube or duckle more popular?
Cube has 21,147 GitHub stars and duckle has 1,546. Cube has the larger community by that measure.
Are Cube and duckle free?
Both are open source. Cube has no licence declared in this registry, and duckle is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Cube and duckle?
Cube is written in Rust and duckle 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, Cube or duckle?
Choose Cube if you want the larger community (21,147 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose duckle if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.