What is Debezium used for?

Debezium is an open-source change data capture platform that streams row-level database changes as events to Kafka and other consumers with low latency. It is a good fit for streaming database changes into Kafka, keeping caches and search indexes in sync, and replicating data between systems.

Is Debezium open source?

Yes. Debezium is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at debezium/debezium and is written mainly in Java.

Yes. Debezium is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Debezium?

Yes. Debezium can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Debezium an alternative to?

Debezium is an open-source alternative to Fivetran, Hevo Data, Striim and Estuary. Other open-source alternatives to Fivetran include Dozer, Duckle and Airbyte.

Is Debezium actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Debezium was on 2 October 2026. The project has 13k stars on GitHub.

Debezium: open-source alternative to Fivetran, Hevo Data

About Debezium

Debezium is an open-source platform for change data capture. You configure it to monitor your databases, and your applications then consume an event for each row-level change. Only committed changes are visible, so consumers do not need to deal with transactions that are rolled back.

It provides one consistent model for change events across different database systems, so applications are insulated from the details of each engine. Changes are recorded in durable, replicated logs, which means a consumer can be stopped and restarted and still receive every event it missed. This removes the need for database-specific triggers or ad hoc change-monitoring code, which the project describes as hard to get right when ordering and low impact on the database both matter.

Debezium is built with Java and Kafka Connect in mind, as the project topics show, and is licensed under Apache-2.0, with the ANTLR grammars in its DDL parser module under the MIT licence. It runs as part of your own data infrastructure and suits data engineers building event streaming pipelines, cache invalidation or data replication.

Key features

Row-level change data capture from databases
Single event model across database types
Only committed changes are exposed
Durable, replicated change logs
Restartable consumers that catch up on missed events
Kafka Connect based modules

Good fit for

→Streaming database changes into Kafka
→Keeping caches and search indexes in sync
→Replicating data between systems

Built with: Java
Tags: change-data-capture; cdc; kafka; kafka-connect; event-streaming; data-pipeline; database; java

Debezium: questions and answers

What is Debezium used for?: Debezium is an open-source change data capture platform that streams row-level database changes as events to Kafka and other consumers with low latency. It is a good fit for streaming database changes into Kafka, keeping caches and search indexes in sync, and replicating data between systems.
Is Debezium open source?: Yes. Debezium is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at debezium/debezium and is written mainly in Java.
Is Debezium free?: Yes. Debezium is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Debezium?: Yes. Debezium can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Debezium an alternative to?: Debezium is an open-source alternative to Fivetran, Hevo Data, Striim and Estuary. Other open-source alternatives to Fivetran include Dozer, Duckle and Airbyte.
Is Debezium actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Debezium was on 2 October 2026. The project has 13k stars on GitHub.