head to head · open source
Cube vs Elementary Data
Cube has 21,147 GitHub stars, 2,179 forks, 1,185 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Elementary Data has 2,429 stars, 239 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. Cube leads on adoption by 771% (21,147 vs 2,429 stars). Cube is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; Elementary Data is written in HTML under Apache-2.0. Cube has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, Elementary Data 10%. Cube was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (bigquery), 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
| Cube | Elementary Data | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 239 |
| 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 Elementary Data if
- You want the Elementary Data feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and Elementary Data 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 Elementary Data
Elementary OSS: dbt native data observability Docs » Join the Elementary Community » ⭐️ Star the repo Built by the Elementary team, helping you deliver trusted data in the AI era. Elementary OSS is the open source CLI for dbt native data observability. It works with the Elementary dbt package to generate the basic Elementary observability report and send alerts to Slack and Microsoft Teams. For teams that need data reliability at scale, we offer Elementary Cloud , a full Data & AI Control Plane with automated ML monitoring, column level lineage from source to BI, a built in catalog, and AI agents that scale…
read the full Elementary Data overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cube or Elementary Data more popular?
Cube has 21,147 GitHub stars and Elementary Data has 2,429. Cube has the larger community by that measure.
Are Cube and Elementary Data free?
Both are open source. Cube has no licence declared in this registry, and Elementary Data is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Cube and Elementary Data?
Cube is written in Rust and Elementary Data in HTML. 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 Elementary Data?
Choose Cube if you want the larger community (21,147 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Elementary Data if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.