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SPECIFICTION
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Alembic vs dbmate

Alembic

alembic.sqlalchemy.org

dbmate

github.com

Side by side

FigureAlembicdbmate
Price fromFreeFree
Free planYesYes
Free trial——
Open source——
Windows—Yes
macOS—Yes
Linux—Yes
Self-hostedYesYes
Plans published11
Spec score · Database Migration Tools7.9 (#12)8.6 (#3)
LicenseThe repository license grants permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell the software, subject to its stated conditions.The repository includes an MIT license.
SupportThe project directs users to GitHub Discussions for bug and feature discussion and its GitHub issue tracker for bug reports and feature requests.The repository README links to a discussion of alternatives and a contribution guide, but the opened page does not specify a support service or response time.

Plans

Alembic

  • AlembicFree

Alembic pricing →

dbmate

  • dbmateFree

dbmate pricing →

In their own words

Alembic

Alembic has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.

Visit alembic.sqlalchemy.org

dbmate

dbmate is a free, open-source command-line tool for keeping database schemas in sync across developers and production servers. It works independently of application language and can be used with Go, Node.js, Python, Ruby, PHP, Rust, C++, and other languages or frameworks. Migrations are plain SQL in timestamp-versioned files. Commands create, apply, and roll back migrations, check status, dump or load a schema, and wait for a database server. The project lists MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and ClickHouse, and documents BigQuery connections and Spanner support for databases using the PostgreSQL dialect. Migrations run atomically in a transaction by default when the database supports transactions, though individual migration blocks can opt out. dbmate can maintain a schema.sql dump for source-control review and Git diffs; creating dumps relies on database client tools such as pg_dump, mysqldump, or sqlite3. It reads DATABASE_URL by default and can load environment variables from a .env file. Installation options include NPM, Homebrew, Scoop, a Linux binary, and Docker images. Go applications can use it as a library, and Go embed can package migrations into an application binary.

Visit github.com