Arroyo vs Estuary
Arroyo
arroyo.devEstuary
estuary.devSide by side
| Figure | Arroyo | Estuary |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $5/mo | $0.50/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 9 |
| Spec score · Stream Analytics Software | 9.2 (#1) | 9.0 (#3) |
| Deployment | Arroyo can run as a single binary, Docker container or Kubernetes deployment, with SQLite for local use and Postgres recommended for distributed production. | Deployment choices include shared public infrastructure, dedicated private data planes and bring-your-own-cloud environments. |
| Founded | 2022 | Estuary says it was founded in 2019. |
| Licence | The official documentation states that Arroyo is fully open source under the Apache 2.0 licence. | The Estuary Flow runtime uses Business Source License 1.1, forbids operating a third-party data-processing service, and is scheduled to change to Apache 2.0 on 2029-11-20; the connector repository is dual MIT/Apache 2.0. |
| Support | The deployment guide invites users rolling out clusters to contact [email protected] or ask questions on Discord. | The Cloud plan includes standard support through community Slack and email; Enterprise includes dedicated Slack and email support. |
| What it does | Arroyo is a Rust distributed stream-processing engine for running SQL over bounded and unbounded event streams with sub-second results. | Estuary is a right-time data platform that captures data once and delivers it to warehouses, operational systems, applications and AI workflows using CDC, streaming, ETL/ELT and scheduled movement. |
Plans
Arroyo
- Arroyo open-sourceFree
- Open-source Arroyo EngineFree
- Cloudflare Workers Paid with Pipelines$5 a month
Estuary
- FreeFree
- Pay-as-you-go$100 a month
- AnnualPriced on request
- DeveloperFree
- FreeFree
- Cloud$0.50 a month
- Cloud PAYG$0.50 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
- Private/BYOCPriced on request
In their own words
Arroyo
Arroyo is an open-source distributed engine for processing stateful computations on data streams, with sub-second results. Users build streaming pipelines in analytical SQL, including complex queries, windows and joins. Arroyo supports checkpointing for fault tolerance and recovery, exactly-once processing, and horizontal and vertical rescaling; it says the engine can handle millions of events per second. Its connectors include Kafka, Kinesis, MQTT, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Delta Lake, HTTP and WebSocket, among others. It reads and writes JSON, Avro, Parquet, text and binary, and includes more than 300 SQL functions. Rust scalar, aggregate and asynchronous user-defined functions can extend SQL. The web UI supports connection management, query development and testing, and pipeline monitoring; pipeline management is also available through a REST API. Single-node clusters are intended for development and testing, while production deployments use a distributed cluster with Arroyo’s scheduler or Kubernetes. It is Apache 2.0 licensed, free at free, and self-hostable.
Estuary
Estuary is a managed data integration platform for combining change data capture, batch, streaming, and app synchronization for analytics, operations, and AI. It supports transformations while data is moving, using SQL, Python, or TypeScript, and describes delivery as exactly once with end-to-end latency under 100 milliseconds. More than 200 prebuilt connectors cover databases, warehouses, SaaS apps, and cloud platforms, including Snowflake, BigQuery, Kafka, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Customers can store data in their own cloud bucket for a duration they choose, and select public, private, or Bring Your Own Cloud deployment. Estuary lists SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, HITECH, CCPA, and GDPR among its compliance standards, and says data is encrypted in transit and at rest. It is available through API, self-hosted, and web options. The indefinite free tier is limited to 10 GB per month and two concurrent connector instances; paid plans start at $100 a month.