head to head · open source
steampipe vs docetl
steampipe has 7,957 GitHub stars, 341 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. docetl has 4,101 stars, 443 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. steampipe leads on adoption by 94% (7,957 vs 4,101 stars). steampipe is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; docetl is written in Python under MIT. steampipe has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, docetl 11%. steampipe was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (etl), 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
| steampipe | docetl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.0K | ★ 4.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 341 | ⑂ 443 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick steampipe if
- You weight community size — 8.0K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick docetl if
- You want the docetl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and docetl fits your workflow better
About steampipe
Steampipe is an AGPL 3.0, Go based zero ETL tool that maps APIs and services to SQL tables, letting anyone who already writes SQL — cloud engineers, DevSecOps and security teams, data engineers — query live data from AWS, Azure, GCP, GitHub and Kubernetes without building a pipeline or running a database.
read the full steampipe overview →
About docetl
DocETL is a Python system for agentic LLM powered data processing and ETL. It lives in the data engineering and document processing ecosystem, where pipelines must turn structured records and unstructured documents into queryable tables. Users describe each operation in natural language, and DocETL provides operators such as map, reduce, and filter, then orchestrates them across the data.
read the full docetl overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is steampipe or docetl more popular?
steampipe has 7,957 GitHub stars and docetl has 4,101. steampipe has the larger community by that measure.
Are steampipe and docetl free?
Both are open source. steampipe is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and docetl under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between steampipe and docetl?
steampipe is written in Go and docetl 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, steampipe or docetl?
Choose steampipe if you want the larger community (7,957 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose docetl if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.