head to head · open source
Cube vs sling-cli
Cube has 21,147 GitHub stars, 2,179 forks, 1,185 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sling-cli has 919 stars, 87 forks, 38 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Cube leads on adoption by 2,201% (21,147 vs 919 stars). Cube is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; sling-cli is written in Go under GPL-3.0. Cube has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, sling-cli 9%. 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 | sling-cli | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 919 |
| License | Custom / other | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 87 |
| 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 sling-cli if
- You want the sling-cli feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and sling-cli 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 sling-cli
Slings from a data source to a data target. See docs.slingdata.io for more details. Sling is a passion project turned into a free CLI Product which offers an easy solution to create and maintain small to medium volume data pipelines using the Extract & Load (EL) approach. It focuses on data movement between: Database to Database File System to Database Database to File System API to Database API to File System Some key features: Single Binary deployment (built with Go). See installation page. Use Custom SQL as a stream: src stream='select from my table where col1 10' Manage / View / Test / Discover your…
read the full sling-cli overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cube or sling-cli more popular?
Cube has 21,147 GitHub stars and sling-cli has 919. Cube has the larger community by that measure.
Are Cube and sling-cli free?
Both are open source. Cube has no licence declared in this registry, and sling-cli is licensed under GPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Cube and sling-cli?
Cube is written in Rust and sling-cli in Go. 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 sling-cli?
Choose Cube if you want the larger community (21,147 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose sling-cli if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.