Canal vs OpenLogReplicator

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.

OpenLogReplicator is a free, open-source Oracle change data capture solution written in C++ for self-hosted Linux deployments. It reads transactions directly from Oracle binary redo logs and streams changes as JSON or Protobuf. Destinations include Kafka, flat files, plain TCP/IP or ZeroMQ network streams, and a discard output for testing. The log-based design is intended to minimize impact on the source database. Archived redo logs can be processed, including offline operation while the database is shut down, and actual DDL commands can be tracked. Basic DML filters can restrict processing, such as selecting INSERT operations for a table. Direct Prometheus metrics include DML counters that can carry schema-name tags. Oracle 23c is supported; binary XMLType support for Oracle 11.2 through 21c is experimental. Debezium use is supported with version 1.3.0 as the minimum and 1.9.0 recommended for Debezium 2.x and 3.x. The GPL v3 plan costs nothing.