head to head · open source
Airbyte vs debezium
Airbyte has 22,303 GitHub stars, 5,431 forks, 2,395 open issues and last shipped yesterday. debezium has 13,307 stars, 3,124 forks, 131 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Airbyte leads on adoption by 68% (22,303 vs 13,307 stars). Airbyte is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; debezium is written in Java under Apache-2.0. Airbyte has attracted 24% as many forks as stars, debezium 23%. debezium was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (change-data-capture, data-pipeline), 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
| Airbyte | debezium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 22K | ★ 13K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Airbyte if
- You weight community size — 22K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick debezium if
- You want the debezium feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and debezium fits your workflow better
About Airbyte
Open source data movement for ELT pipelines and AI agents — from APIs, databases & files to warehouses, lakes, and AI applications We believe that only an open source solution to data movement can cover the long tail of data sources while empowering data engineers to customize existing connectors. Our ultimate vision is to help you move data from any source to any destination — whether that destination is a data warehouse, a data lake, or an AI agent. Airbyte provides a catalog of 600+ connectors for APIs, databases, data warehouses, data lakes, and AI applications. Screenshot taken from Airbyte Cloud . Pick the…
read the full Airbyte overview →
About debezium
Copyright Debezium Authors. Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The Antlr grammars within the debezium ddl parser module are licensed under the MIT License. English Chinese Japanese Korean Debezium Debezium is an open source project that provides a low latency data streaming platform for change data capture (CDC). You set up and configure Debezium to monitor your databases, and then your applications consume events for each row level change made to the database. Only committed changes are visible, so your application doesn't have to worry about transactions or changes that are rolled back. Debezium…
read the full debezium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Airbyte or debezium more popular?
Airbyte has 22,303 GitHub stars and debezium has 13,307. Airbyte has the larger community by that measure.
Are Airbyte and debezium free?
Both are open source. Airbyte has no licence declared in this registry, and debezium is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Airbyte and debezium?
Airbyte is written in Python and debezium in Java. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Airbyte or debezium?
Choose Airbyte if you want the larger community (22,303 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose debezium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.