Maxwell's Daemon vs PeerDB
Maxwell's Daemon
maxwells-daemon.ioPeerDB
peerdb.ioSide by side
| Figure | Maxwell's Daemon | PeerDB |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $250/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 5 |
| Spec score · Change Data Capture Software | 7.4 (#14) | 7.9 (#10) |
Plans
PeerDB
- Open sourceFree
- Micro$250 a month
- Small$1,000 a month
- Medium$2,000 a month
- Large$4,000 a month
In their own words
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.
PeerDB
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Elasticsearch, Kafka, Redpanda, Confluent, Azure Event Hubs, Google Pub/Sub, and S3 destinations are deprecated and no longer actively maintained.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.