head to head · open source
steampipe vs docetl
steampipe has 7,994 GitHub stars, 347 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped yesterday. docetl has 4,195 stars, 463 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. steampipe leads on adoption by 91% (7,994 vs 4,195 stars). steampipe is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; docetl is written in Python under MIT. steampipe has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, docetl 11%. steampipe was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (etl), 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
| steampipe | docetl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.0K | ★ 4.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 347 | ⑂ 463 |
| 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 docetl if
- You want the docetl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and docetl fits your workflow better
About steampipe
select from cloud; Steampipe is the zero ETL way to query APIs and services. Use it to expose data sources to SQL. SQL . It's been the data access standard for decades. Live data . Query APIs in real time. Speed . Query APIs faster than you ever thought possible. Concurrency . Query many data sources in parallel. Single binary . Use it locally, deploy it in CI/CD pipelines. Demo time! Documentation See the documentation for: Running queries Managing Steampipe CLI commands Integrations Developing plugins Install Steampipe Install Steampipe from the downloads page: Install a plugin for your favorite service (e.g…
read the full steampipe overview →
About docetl
DocETL: Declarative & Agentic Map Reduce What is DocETL · Install · Python API · YAML · DocWrangler UI · Docs What is DocETL DocETL helps you process large collections of data (structured and unstructured) with LLMs. You write each operation in natural language, e.g., "pull out every complaint in this ticket," and DocETL provides the operators you need (map, reduce, filter, and more) and orchestrates them, parallelizing work across your data, optimizes your pipeline automatically, swapping models, rewriting prompts, decomposing operations, and replacing subtasks with code wherever possible, to raise accuracy and…
read the full docetl overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is steampipe or docetl more popular?
steampipe has 7,994 GitHub stars and docetl has 4,195. steampipe has the larger community by that measure.
Are steampipe and docetl free?
Both are open source. steampipe is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and docetl under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between steampipe and docetl?
steampipe is written in Go and docetl in Python. 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 docetl?
Choose steampipe if you want the larger community (7,994 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose docetl if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.