head to head · open source
Cube vs realtime
Cube has 20,857 GitHub stars, 2,138 forks, 1,185 open issues and last shipped yesterday. realtime has 7,634 stars, 467 forks, 78 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Cube leads on adoption by 173% (20,857 vs 7,634 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 | ★ 7.6K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Elixir |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.1K | ⑂ 467 |
| 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
Cube Core is an open source semantic layer for AI, BI, and embedded analytics. It lives in the data analytics and data engineering ecosystem for SQL warehouses, BI tools, applications, and AI agents. It lets teams define metrics, dimensions, joins, and access rules once in code, then expose them through SQL, REST, and GraphQL APIs. It is headless and ships no user interface.
About realtime
Supabase Realtime is a server built with Elixir on the Phoenix Framework that pushes three kinds of realtime functionality to browser and server clients over WebSockets. It lives in the Supabase ecosystem, where it acts as the realtime layer alongside Postgres, and it is distributed as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. The project has been public for roughly seven years, carries 7,632 stars and 463 forks, and its topic list places it in the company of change data capture, CRDT, distributed systems, pubsub, and PostgreSQL tooling.
read the full realtime overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cube or realtime more popular?
Cube has 20,857 GitHub stars and realtime has 7,634. 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 (20,857 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.