airbyte
The leading data integration platform for ETL / ELT data pipelines from APIs, databases & files to data warehouses, data lakes & data lakehouses. Both self-hosted and Cloud-hosted.
The Lens
Airbyte is the open source ETL platform for moving data between services. Postgres to Snowflake, Salesforce to BigQuery, Stripe to your data warehouse: pick from hundreds of connectors and let Airbyte handle extract, load, and scheduling. The self-hosted version is free and covers every connector the team ships.
Running it yourself is real work. You're deploying a platform with a scheduler, workers, and a database, not a CLI. Kubernetes is the blessed path. Expect a few hours a month on connector updates, credential rotation, and failure monitoring.
Solo: Cloud free tier. Small team with a data engineer: self-host and save hundreds. Enterprise: self-host for compliance, buy the license for SSO. The Cloud tier is usage-based and most small teams land at $100-500/mo.
The catch: the big connector count is marketing. The top 30 are production-grade. The long tail is community-maintained and sometimes broken on the latest API version. Test every connector you plan to depend on.
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Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
open core**Free (self-hosted):** Deploy on Docker, Kubernetes, or VM. All connectors, full platform. You run the control plane, workers, and database. Source-available license for the core, with enterprise features (SSO, RBAC, audit logs) gated behind a paid license.
**Airbyte Cloud:** - Free tier: limited sync volume per month, good for trying it out - Standard: usage-based, pay per row synced, most small teams land at $100-500/mo - Enterprise: custom pricing with SSO, RBAC, and dedicated support
The self-hosted version is production-ready. Cloud buys you zero infrastructure, automatic connector updates, and priority support. For a team already running Kubernetes, self-hosting saves real money. For a team that wants pipelines to just work, Cloud pays for itself in ops hours you don't spend.
Free to self-host with every connector. Airbyte Cloud is usage-based and most small teams land in the low hundreds per month.
License: Other
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Commercial use: ✗ Restricted
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