head to head · open source
Cube vs sling-cli
Cube has 20,860 GitHub stars, 2,140 forks, 1,185 open issues and last shipped today. sling-cli has 904 stars, 81 forks, 38 open issues and last shipped today. Cube leads on adoption by 2,208% (20,860 vs 904 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 | ★ 904 |
| License | Custom / other | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.1K | ⑂ 81 |
| 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
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 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 connectio…
read the full sling-cli overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cube or sling-cli more popular?
Cube has 20,860 GitHub stars and sling-cli has 904. 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 (20,860 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.