head to head · open source
steampipe vs Lightdash
steampipe has 7,957 GitHub stars, 341 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Lightdash has 6,145 stars, 777 forks, 1,018 open issues and last shipped today. steampipe leads on adoption by 29% (7,957 vs 6,145 stars). steampipe is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; Lightdash is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence. steampipe has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, Lightdash 13%. Lightdash was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | Lightdash | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.0K | ★ 6.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 341 | ⑂ 777 |
| 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 Lightdash if
- You want the Lightdash feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Lightdash 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 Lightdash
Lightdash is an open source, agentic business intelligence platform for modern data teams, written in TypeScript and distributed under a NOASSERTION license. It lives in the data and analytics ecosystem, specifically the data engineering and integration space, and it is built around dbt and warehouse native workflows. The project describes itself as agentic BI, meaning analytics is intended to move at the speed of code rather than through point and click configuration alone.
read the full Lightdash overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is steampipe or Lightdash more popular?
steampipe has 7,957 GitHub stars and Lightdash has 6,145. steampipe has the larger community by that measure.
Are steampipe and Lightdash free?
Both are open source. steampipe is licensed under AGPL-3.0, and Lightdash has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between steampipe and Lightdash?
steampipe is written in Go and Lightdash in TypeScript. 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 Lightdash?
Choose steampipe if you want the larger community (7,957 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Lightdash if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.