Canal vs PeerDB

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.

PeerDB streams data from Postgres to data warehouses, queues, and storage engines, using one-way replication. Its supported methods include log-based change data capture, cursor-based replication with timestamps or integers, and XMIN-based replication. A Postgres-compatible SQL interface supports ETL and data movement, and PeerDB handles Postgres data types such as jsonb, arrays, and PostGIS, as well as TOAST columns and schema changes. The actively maintained source connectors are PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, CockroachDB, and BigQuery; actively maintained destinations are ClickHouse, ClickHouse Cloud, and Postgres. Snowflake, BigQuery, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Redpanda, Confluent, Azure Event Hubs, Google Pub/Sub, and S3 destinations are deprecated and no longer actively maintained. PeerDB is available for free deployment under the AGPL-3.0 license. Paid plans start at $250/mo for Micro, which allows up to two vcores and is recommended for up to 50 million rows moved per month. Larger plans list higher row-volume recommendations and vcore limits. PeerDB states that it is 10x faster than existing tools and reports SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance.