head to head · open source
realtime vs peerdb
realtime has 7,635 GitHub stars, 468 forks, 78 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. peerdb has 3,274 stars, 213 forks, 204 open issues and last shipped yesterday. realtime leads on adoption by 133% (7,635 vs 3,274 stars). realtime is written in Elixir under Apache-2.0; peerdb is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. realtime has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, peerdb 7%. peerdb was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (cdc, distributed-systems, postgres, postgresql), 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
| realtime | peerdb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 7.6K | ★ 3.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Elixir | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 468 | ⑂ 213 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick realtime if
- You weight community size — 7.6K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Elixir
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick peerdb if
- You want the peerdb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and peerdb fits your workflow better
About realtime
Supabase Realtime is a server built with Elixir on the Phoenix Framework that pushes three kinds of realtime functionality to browser and server clients over WebSockets. It lives in the Supabase ecosystem, where it acts as the realtime layer alongside Postgres, and it is distributed as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. The project has been public for roughly seven years, carries 7,632 stars and 463 forks, and its topic list places it in the company of change data capture, CRDT, distributed systems, pubsub, and PostgreSQL tooling.
read the full realtime overview →
About peerdb
PeerDB is a data integration project in the Postgres ecosystem. It lives in the Data & Analytics / Data Engineering & Integration category and focuses on streaming data from Postgres to data warehouses, queues, and storage engines. The project is built around Postgres first ETL and change data capture workflows rather than a broad connector catalog.
read the full peerdb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is realtime or peerdb more popular?
realtime has 7,635 GitHub stars and peerdb has 3,274. realtime has the larger community by that measure.
Are realtime and peerdb free?
Both are open source. realtime is licensed under Apache-2.0 and peerdb under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between realtime and peerdb?
realtime is written in Elixir and peerdb in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, realtime or peerdb?
Choose realtime if you want the larger community (7,635 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose peerdb if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.