Canal vs Decodable

Canal is a free, self-hosted project that parses MySQL binary logs so applications can subscribe to and consume database changes incrementally. It acts like a MySQL replica, requesting binlog data from a master and parsing the events. Listed uses include database mirroring and real-time backup, index maintenance, cache refresh, and business-logic processing. The README lists source versions MySQL 5.1.x, 5.5.x, 5.6.x, 5.7.x, and 8.0.x. Canal can send change records to Kafka and RocketMQ; the quick start also lists RabbitMQ and Pulsar server modes. Its Protocol Buffers 3.0 client-server design has clients for Java, C#, Go, and Python. Canal Admin provides a web interface for managing configuration, tasks, and logs, and the project lists native Prometheus monitoring. Docker images and a Docker QuickStart are available, but the default setup runs only one Canal instance per Docker instance. The project is licensed under Apache-2.0.

Decodable is a managed, serverless platform for real-time ETL, ELT, and stream processing, built on Apache Flink and Debezium. It lets teams create pipelines in SQL, Java, or Python and manage them through a UI, CLI, APIs, or dbt. SQL supports transformations, filtering, stateful joins, and complex event processing. Pipelines process data exactly once by default and can resume after a stop or failure. Connectors include Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, Apache Iceberg, and Snowflake, with Debezium-powered change data capture. Teams can use Decodable-hosted infrastructure or a Bring Your Own Cloud deployment. The free plan costs nothing and does not expire or require a credit card; it includes 24 hours or 10GiB of stream retention, 20 streams, and four running tasks. On Demand costs $0.12 a month, billed monthly, and Enterprise costs $0.10 a year, billed annually with committed capacity. Decodable is available via API, web, and self-hosted deployment.