head to head · open source
Cube vs steampipe
Cube has 20,867 GitHub stars, 2,139 forks, 1,185 open issues and last shipped today. steampipe has 7,957 stars, 341 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Cube leads on adoption by 162% (20,867 vs 7,957 stars). Cube is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; steampipe is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Cube has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, steampipe 4%. Cube 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
| Cube | steampipe | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 8.0K |
| License | Custom / other | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.1K | ⑂ 341 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Cube if
- You weight community size — 21K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick steampipe if
- You want the steampipe 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 steampipe fits your workflow better
About Cube
Cube Core is an open source semantic layer for AI, BI, and embedded analytics. It lives in the data analytics and data engineering ecosystem for SQL warehouses, BI tools, applications, and AI agents. It lets teams define metrics, dimensions, joins, and access rules once in code, then expose them through SQL, REST, and GraphQL APIs. It is headless and ships no user interface.
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cube or steampipe more popular?
Cube has 20,867 GitHub stars and steampipe has 7,957. Cube has the larger community by that measure.
Are Cube and steampipe free?
Both are open source. Cube has no licence declared in this registry, and steampipe is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Cube and steampipe?
Cube is written in Rust and steampipe 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, Cube or steampipe?
Choose Cube if you want the larger community (20,867 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose steampipe if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.