Alembic vs dbmate
Alembic
alembic.sqlalchemy.orgdbmate
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Alembic | dbmate |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Database Migration Tools | 7.9 (#12) | 8.6 (#3) |
| License | The repository license grants permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell the software, subject to its stated conditions. | The repository includes an MIT license. |
| Support | The 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
In their own words
Alembic
Alembic has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
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.