head to head · open source
steampipe vs flink-cdc
steampipe has 7,957 GitHub stars, 341 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. flink-cdc has 6,477 stars, 2,197 forks, 119 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. steampipe leads on adoption by 23% (7,957 vs 6,477 stars). steampipe is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; flink-cdc is written in Java under Apache-2.0. steampipe has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, flink-cdc 34%. flink-cdc 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 | flink-cdc | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.0K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 341 | ⑂ 2.2K |
| 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 flink-cdc if
- You want the flink-cdc 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 flink-cdc 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 flink-cdc
Flink CDC is an Apache 2.0 streaming data integration tool built on Apache Flink that moves real time and batch data between databases and downstream systems, and it is aimed at data engineers and platform teams who need change data capture pipelines without writing per source job code.
read the full flink-cdc overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is steampipe or flink-cdc more popular?
steampipe has 7,957 GitHub stars and flink-cdc has 6,477. steampipe has the larger community by that measure.
Are steampipe and flink-cdc free?
Both are open source. steampipe is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and flink-cdc under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between steampipe and flink-cdc?
steampipe is written in Go and flink-cdc 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, steampipe or flink-cdc?
Choose steampipe if you want the larger community (7,957 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose flink-cdc if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.