head to head · open source
realtime vs olake
realtime has 7,635 GitHub stars, 468 forks, 78 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. olake has 1,453 stars, 252 forks, 178 open issues and last shipped yesterday. realtime leads on adoption by 425% (7,635 vs 1,453 stars). realtime is written in Elixir under Apache-2.0; olake is written in Go under Apache-2.0. realtime has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, olake 17%. olake was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (cdc, change-data-capture), 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 | olake | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 7.6K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Elixir | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 468 | ⑂ 252 |
| 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 olake if
- You want the olake feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and olake 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 olake
OLake Go is an open source data ingestion engine written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It replicates transactional databases, Apache Kafka, and S3 into Apache Iceberg or plain Parquet, and it provides a web UI and a command line interface for building scalable, real time pipelines. The project sits in the Apache Iceberg and lakehouse ecosystem, where its stated goal is to move data into vendor neutral table formats that can be read by query engines and warehouses.
read the full olake overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is realtime or olake more popular?
realtime has 7,635 GitHub stars and olake has 1,453. realtime has the larger community by that measure.
Are realtime and olake free?
Both are open source. realtime is licensed under Apache-2.0 and olake under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between realtime and olake?
realtime is written in Elixir and olake 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 olake?
Choose realtime if you want the larger community (7,635 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose olake if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.