head to head · open source
steampipe vs realtime
steampipe has 7,957 GitHub stars, 341 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. realtime has 7,635 stars, 468 forks, 78 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. steampipe leads on adoption by 4% (7,957 vs 7,635 stars). steampipe is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; realtime is written in Elixir under Apache-2.0. steampipe has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, realtime 6%. realtime 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
| steampipe | realtime | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.0K | ★ 7.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Elixir |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 341 | ⑂ 468 |
| 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 realtime if
- You want the realtime feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Elixir
- You evaluated both and realtime fits your workflow better
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 →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is steampipe or realtime more popular?
steampipe has 7,957 GitHub stars and realtime has 7,635. steampipe has the larger community by that measure.
Are steampipe and realtime free?
Both are open source. steampipe is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and realtime under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between steampipe and realtime?
steampipe is written in Go and realtime in Elixir. 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 realtime?
Choose steampipe if you want the larger community (7,957 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose realtime if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.