head to head · open source
Cube vs realtime
Cube has 21,147 GitHub stars, 2,179 forks, 1,185 open issues and last shipped yesterday. realtime has 7,673 stars, 479 forks, 78 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Cube leads on adoption by 176% (21,147 vs 7,673 stars). Cube is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; realtime is written in Elixir under Apache-2.0. Cube has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, realtime 6%. 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 | realtime | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 7.7K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Elixir |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 479 |
| 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 realtime if
- You want the realtime feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Elixir
- You evaluated both and realtime 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 realtime
Supabase Realtime Send ephemeral messages, track and synchronize shared state, and listen to Postgres changes all over WebSockets. Examples · Request Features · Report Bugs Status This repository focuses on version 2 but you can still access the previous version's code and Docker image. For the latest Docker images go to The codebase is under heavy development and the documentation is constantly evolving. Give it a try and let us know what you think by creating an issue. Watch releases of this repo to get notified of updates. And give us a star if you like it! Overview What is this? This is a server built with…
read the full realtime overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cube or realtime more popular?
Cube has 21,147 GitHub stars and realtime has 7,673. Cube has the larger community by that measure.
Are Cube and realtime free?
Both are open source. Cube has no licence declared in this registry, and realtime is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Cube and realtime?
Cube is written in Rust and realtime in Elixir. 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 realtime?
Choose Cube if you want the larger community (21,147 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose realtime if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.