head to head · open source
seatunnel vs flink-cdc
seatunnel has 9,657 GitHub stars, 2,416 forks, 705 open issues and last shipped today. flink-cdc has 6,477 stars, 2,197 forks, 119 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. seatunnel leads on adoption by 49% (9,657 vs 6,477 stars). seatunnel is written in Java under Apache-2.0; flink-cdc is written in Java under Apache-2.0. seatunnel has attracted 25% as many forks as stars, flink-cdc 34%. seatunnel was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (batch, cdc, change-data-capture, data-integration), 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
| seatunnel | flink-cdc | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 9.7K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick seatunnel if
- You weight community size — 9.7K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- 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 seatunnel
Apache SeaTunnel is a multimodal, high performance, distributed data integration tool that is capable of synchronizing vast amounts of data daily. It is an Apache Software Foundation project written in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license, with a home on the web at seatunnel.apache.org. The project has been in development for roughly nine years and has accumulated 9,652 stars and 2,407 forks on GitHub. It sits in the Data & Analytics ecosystem, specifically in data engineering and integration, and it is built around a connector driven model: sources, sinks, and transforms are configured as jobs, and tho…
read the full seatunnel 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 seatunnel or flink-cdc more popular?
seatunnel has 9,657 GitHub stars and flink-cdc has 6,477. seatunnel has the larger community by that measure.
Are seatunnel and flink-cdc free?
Both are open source. seatunnel is licensed under Apache-2.0 and flink-cdc under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between seatunnel and flink-cdc?
seatunnel is written in Java 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, seatunnel or flink-cdc?
Choose seatunnel if you want the larger community (9,657 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose flink-cdc if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.