Definite vs Malloy

Definite combines data connectors, storage, modeling, business intelligence, and an AI analyst in one data platform. Its analyst, Fi, takes plain-English questions and can build data apps with filters, KPIs, tables, and charts. The integrations directory lists 525 sources, including Salesforce, Stripe, PostgreSQL, Shopify, and Google Analytics. Pipelines ingest CSV, Parquet, JSON, and NDJSON files, and support log-based change data capture for Postgres, MySQL, and Oracle where supported. Definite also supports MCP clients such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor, providing schema, lineage, and semantic context. Users can build custom data applications and search millions of rows in a browser using DuckDB-Wasm. Security measures include TLS 1.2+ encryption in transit, AES-256 encryption at rest, and role-based access controls. The Free plan has two users, two connectors, 1 GB of storage, five monthly credits, and daily sync. Standard costs $250 a month and includes 100 monthly credits and hourly sync. Enterprise pricing is custom and not listed.

Malloy is an open source language for describing data relationships and transformations. Users can define reusable calculations, table relationships and business logic in semantic models, then compile queries into SQL optimized for the connected database. The language supports nested datasets and automatically guards against common errors in sums, averages and counts. Supported databases include DuckDB, MotherDuck, BigQuery, Databricks, Snowflake, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Trino and Presto. DuckDB can read Parquet, CSV and JSON files without additional setup. Malloy offers a Visual Studio Code extension for modeling, querying, transformation and visualization, plus a browser notebook through github.dev that requires a GitHub sign-in. Its Python package loads models, compiles queries and runs statements with DuckDB and BigQuery. The CLI can run Malloy files, build persistent tables and automate transformations and pipelines. The project is free and open source, with web, editor extension, API and self-hosted options, among others. DuckDB connections can disable network access; sandboxed mode also limits file access to allowed directories.