head to head · open source
Cube vs sycamore
Cube has 21,147 GitHub stars, 2,179 forks, 1,185 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sycamore has 605 stars, 71 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Cube leads on adoption by 3,395% (21,147 vs 605 stars). Cube is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; sycamore is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Cube has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, sycamore 12%. Cube was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai), 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 | sycamore | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 605 |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 71 |
| 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 sycamore if
- You want the sycamore feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and sycamore 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 sycamore
Sycamore is an open source, AI powered document processing engine for ETL, RAG, LLM based applications, and analytics on unstructured data. Sycamore can partition and enrich a wide range of document types including reports, presentations, transcripts, manuals, and more. It can analyze and chunk complex documents such as PDFs and images with embedded tables, figures, graphs, and other infographics. Check out an example notebook. For processing documents, Sycamore leverages Aryn DocParse (formerly known as the Aryn Partitioning Service), a serverless, GPU powered API for segmenting and labeling documents, doing…
read the full sycamore overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cube or sycamore more popular?
Cube has 21,147 GitHub stars and sycamore has 605. Cube has the larger community by that measure.
Are Cube and sycamore free?
Both are open source. Cube has no licence declared in this registry, and sycamore is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Cube and sycamore?
Cube is written in Rust and sycamore in Python. 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 sycamore?
Choose Cube if you want the larger community (21,147 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose sycamore if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.