head to head · open source
excelize vs dbt
excelize has 20,918 GitHub stars, 1,949 forks, 131 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. dbt has 13,851 stars, 2,567 forks, 1,534 open issues and last shipped yesterday. excelize leads on adoption by 51% (20,918 vs 13,851 stars). excelize is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause; dbt is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. excelize has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, dbt 19%. dbt was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (analytics), 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
| excelize | dbt | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 14K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 2.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick excelize if
- You weight community size — 21K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick dbt if
- You want the dbt feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and dbt fits your workflow better
About excelize
Excelize is a pure Go library for reading and writing XLAM, XLSM, XLSX, XLTM and XLTX spreadsheets, built for Go developers who need to generate or parse Microsoft Excel 2007 and later workbooks directly from their own code.
read the full excelize overview →
About dbt
dbt is an open source data transformation framework that lets data analysts and engineers transform their data using the same practices software engineers use to build applications, and it is aimed at analytics teams that model data inside a warehouse.
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Frequently asked questions
Is excelize or dbt more popular?
excelize has 20,918 GitHub stars and dbt has 13,851. excelize has the larger community by that measure.
Are excelize and dbt free?
Both are open source. excelize is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and dbt under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between excelize and dbt?
excelize is written in Go and dbt in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, excelize or dbt?
Choose excelize if you want the larger community (20,918 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose dbt if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.