Soda vs tSQLt
Soda
soda.io
tSQLt
tsqlt.orgSide by side
| Figure | Soda | tSQLt |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $750/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 1 |
| Spec score · Database Testing Tools | 8.7 (#4) | 7.8 (#14) |
| Integrations | Soda advertises integrations with data-stack tools, catalogs, orchestration systems, incident-management tools and CI/CD workflows. | The site identifies Redgate SQL Test as its preferred commercial SSMS extension and the official SSMS plug-in for tSQLt. |
| License | Soda Core changed from Apache 2.0 to Elastic License 2.0 in January 2026; the source remains readable and modifiable but cannot be offered as a competing hosted service. | The official repository identifies the license as Apache 2.0. |
| Purpose | Soda is a data quality platform for monitoring data quality, catching problems early, understanding issues at source, and taking action. | tSQLt is an open source framework for unit testing SQL Server databases with tests written in T-SQL. |
Plans
In their own words
Soda
Soda is a data quality platform for monitoring production data, testing data through development and deployment, and investigating issues. Its machine-learning-powered observability looks for unexpected changes without requiring every rule to be set in advance. Teams can test data during development, deployment, transformation, and CI/CD workflows. Data contracts let producers and consumers specify expected schemas, data types, value ranges, and other constraints. Soda lists integrations including Databricks, Snowflake, PostgreSQL, Airflow, dbt, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, and PagerDuty, and offers three deployment models for different infrastructure and privacy needs. Its listed database support includes Athena, BigQuery, Databricks SQL, Dremio, DuckDB, Fabric, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Redshift, Spark Dataframe, Snowflake, SQL Server, Synapse, and Trino. The Free plan is free and includes pipeline testing, metrics observability, and alerting and ticketing integrations. Team is $750 a month; Enterprise has no listed price. Soda lists SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 3, DORA, and GDPR under compliance. It was founded in 2019 and lists locations in Chicago, Illinois, and Brussels, Belgium.
tSQLt
tSQLt is an open-source unit testing framework for Microsoft SQL Server. Developers write tests in T-SQL, organize them in schemas, and define shared setup methods there. Tests run automatically inside transactions to remain independent and reduce cleanup work. For isolation, tSQLt can fake tables and views and create stored procedure spies. Assertions include AssertEquals and AssertEqualsTable, while results can be generated as plain text or XML for continuous integration tools. The project says it works with SQL Server editions from SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 onward. tSQLt is self-hosted, released under the Apache 2.0 license, and the listed plan costs nothing. Installation requires running PrepareServer.sql once per server with SA permission, then installing the framework in a development database. The quick start explicitly says never to install tSQLt in production. Redgate SQL Test is named as its preferred SSMS plug-in.