Maxwell's Daemon vs Sequin
Maxwell's Daemon
maxwells-daemon.ioSequin
sequinstream.comSide by side
| Figure | Maxwell's Daemon | Sequin |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Change Data Capture Software | 7.4 (#14) | 7.9 (#12) |
| Deployment | The quick start documents running Maxwell from the command line or Docker and provides a binary distribution and Homebrew installation command. | Sequin runs as a Docker image alongside Postgres and uses Postgres to store sink state. |
| Monitoring | Metrics can be exposed through logging, JMX, HTTP, or Datadog, and HTTP endpoints include metrics, Prometheus, health check, ping, and diagnostics. | Sequin exposes Prometheus metrics and provides a Grafana dashboard. |
| Use cases | The site lists ETL, database change auditing, cache building or expiring, search indexing, and inter-service communication as use cases. | The maker highlights event streaming, audit logging, cache synchronization, and search indexing as use cases. |
Plans
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.
Sequin
Sequin streams changes from PostgreSQL to destinations such as Kafka, Redis, queues, search indexes, and webhooks. It runs as a Docker image alongside the database and can be started with Docker Compose, so deployment is self-hosted. Users can filter and transform changes, add data from Postgres, and route results to destinations including AWS SQS, GCP Pub/Sub, NATS, Elasticsearch, Typesense, and Meilisearch. Backfills can start at the beginning of a table or a chosen point, and can replay selected rows. Sequin describes delivery as using automatic retries, exponential backoff, strict ordering, and exactly-once processing. Sinks can be managed through a console, CLI, YAML configuration, or API. Monitoring includes a Prometheus metrics endpoint and Grafana dashboard. PostgreSQL 14 or later is supported; versions 12 and 13 have limitations. Sequin is open source under the MIT license, with a listed self-hosted plan at free. Sequin Cloud shut down on October 23, 2025; the project continues in maintenance mode with security patches and critical bug fixes.