Debezium vs Maxwell's Daemon
Debezium
debezium.ioMaxwell's Daemon
maxwells-daemon.ioSide by side
| Figure | Debezium | Maxwell's Daemon |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Change Data Capture Software | 8.9 (#2) | 7.4 (#14) |
| Deployment | The most common deployment uses Apache Kafka Connect; Debezium can also be embedded in JVM applications or run through Debezium Server. | The quick start documents running Maxwell from the command line or Docker and provides a binary distribution and Homebrew installation command. |
| What it does | Debezium captures row-level database changes so applications can respond to inserts, updates, and deletes as events. | Maxwell reads MySQL binlogs and writes database changes as JSON to Kafka, Kinesis, and other streaming platforms. |
Plans
In their own words
Debezium
Debezium captures row-level database changes and delivers them to applications as events, so they can respond to inserts, updates, and deletes. Its connectors use database logs for low-delay capture without requiring changes to the data model, and can take initial or incremental snapshots, filter schemas, tables, and columns, and mask selected values. Listed databases include MongoDB, MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Db2, and Cassandra. Connectors for Vitess, Spanner, Informix, CockroachDB, YashanDB, Ingres, and Milvus are marked incubating and may change without backward compatibility. A common deployment uses Apache Kafka Connect; Debezium can also run through Debezium Server or as a library in JVM applications. Debezium Server can send serialized events to Amazon Kinesis, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, and Apache Pulsar. Ready-to-use transformations support routing, filtering, and event flattening. Debezium is free under the Apache Software License 2.0. Its quay.io container images are for testing and evaluation, not production.
Maxwell's Daemon
Maxwell's Daemon is a free, open-source, self-hosted Linux tool for moving MySQL changes into streaming systems. It reads MySQL binary logs and emits database changes as JSON for Kafka, Kinesis, SQS, SNS, NATS, Google Cloud Pub/Sub, BigQuery, RabbitMQ, Redis, and other destinations. Listed uses include ETL, database change auditing, cache building or expiration, search indexing, and communication between services. Filtering can select databases, tables, and column values, while JavaScript filters handle custom row filtering and data changes. When encryption is enabled, messages use AES/CBC/PKCS5PADDING with a user-provided key and base64-encoded values. Metrics can be exposed through logging, JMX, HTTP, or Datadog; HTTP endpoints cover metrics, Prometheus, health checks, ping, and diagnostics. Maxwell supports schema evolution and an initial snapshot. Deployment options include command line, Docker, binary distribution, and Homebrew. Requirements include JRE 11 or later, supported MySQL versions from 5.1 through 8, and Kafka 0.8.2 or later when Kafka is used.