SQL Formatter VSCode vs SQLFluff
SQL Formatter VSCode
github.com
SQLFluff
sqlfluff.comSide by side
| Figure | SQL Formatter VSCode | SQLFluff |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · SQL Linters and Formatters | 7.3 (#20) | 8.0 (#10) |
| Dialect support | The extension lists dialects including BigQuery, DB2, DuckDB, Hive, MariaDB, MySQL, PL/SQL, PostgreSQL, Redshift, Snowflake, Spark, SQLite, Trino, and TransactSQL. | The documentation says SQLFluff supports more than 25 SQL dialects, including T-SQL, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, and Snowflake. |
| Purpose | SQL Formatter VSCode is the official VSCode extension of the SQL Formatter library and formats SQL files. | SQLFluff is an open source, dialect-flexible SQL linter designed with ELT applications in mind. |
| Support | The extension README directs users to report issues through the SQL Formatter library's GitHub issue tracker and recommends reading its FAQ first. | The project lists documentation, GitHub, Slack, and Stack Overflow as community channels. |
Plans
In their own words
SQL Formatter VSCode
SQL Formatter VSCode has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
SQLFluff
SQLFluff is an open-source, dialect-flexible SQL linter designed for ELT applications. It reports style and syntax issues, parses SQL without database access and can automatically fix many violations with one command. Documentation describes support for more than 25 dialects, including T-SQL, PostgreSQL, BigQuery and Snowflake, alongside more than 70 rules for style, structure and best practices. Jinja templating and dbt are supported, and CI/CD integration includes GitHub Actions output for pull-request annotations. SQLFluff is free under the MIT License and installs from PyPI with pip or another Python package manager. It does not execute SQL itself, but templating macros such as dbt's run_query may execute arbitrary SQL. The Jinja templater uses Jinja2 SandboxedEnvironment to limit unsafe code execution. The dbt templater requires the relevant adapter and sqlfluff-templater-dbt package; models accessing a database during compilation require database access. Community support includes documentation, GitHub, Slack and Stack Overflow.