What is RisingWave used for?

RisingWave is an open-source event streaming platform that ingests data from databases, streams and webhooks, processes it incrementally with SQL and serves fresh results at low latency. It is a good fit for real-time data pipelines in SQL, fresh data for AI agents and applications, and replacing a Kafka plus Flink stack.

Is RisingWave open source?

Yes. RisingWave is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at risingwavelabs/risingwave and is written mainly in Rust.

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

Can I self-host RisingWave?

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

What is RisingWave an alternative to?

RisingWave is an open-source alternative to Striim, Estuary, Google Cloud Dataflow and Amazon Kinesis. Other open-source alternatives to Striim include Debezium, Kafka and Duckle.

Is RisingWave actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to RisingWave was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v3.1.0, published on 21 September 2026. The project has 9.4k stars on GitHub.

RisingWave: open-source alternative to Striim, Estuary

About RisingWave

RisingWave is an event streaming platform, positioned for agentic AI and real-time applications, that continuously takes in data, transforms it and serves it. It is meant to replace the familiar chain of Debezium (change data capture), Kafka (transport), Flink (processing) and a serving database with one system, removing the latency and operational work of each hop.

Sources include webhooks from SaaS applications, native change data capture from PostgreSQL and MySQL, event streams such as Kafka, Pulsar and Kinesis, and batch data from S3 and warehouses, all unified under a SQL interface where streams and tables can be joined. Processing is incremental: if upstream data changes, just the affected results get recomputed, which keeps materialized views up to date without full recomputation. Results are queryable directly, and the topics mention PostgreSQL compatibility and Apache Iceberg.

RisingWave is written in Rust and licensed under Apache-2.0. It can be tried with Docker or Kubernetes using the quick start guide, and it suits data engineers who want streaming pipelines defined in SQL instead of several separate services.

Key features

Ingestion from CDC, Kafka, webhooks and batch sources
Incremental stream processing in SQL
Always up-to-date materialized views
Low-latency serving of query results
Interface compatible with PostgreSQL clients
Docker and Kubernetes deployment

Good fit for

→Real-time data pipelines in SQL
→Fresh data for AI agents and applications
→Replacing a Kafka plus Flink stack

Built with: Rust; PostgreSQL
Tags: stream-processing; event-streaming; materialized-views; cdc; sql; rust; data-engineering; kafka; real-time

RisingWave: questions and answers

What is RisingWave used for?: RisingWave is an open-source event streaming platform that ingests data from databases, streams and webhooks, processes it incrementally with SQL and serves fresh results at low latency. It is a good fit for real-time data pipelines in SQL, fresh data for AI agents and applications, and replacing a Kafka plus Flink stack.
Is RisingWave open source?: Yes. RisingWave is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at risingwavelabs/risingwave and is written mainly in Rust.
Is RisingWave free?: Yes. RisingWave is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host RisingWave?: Yes. RisingWave can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is RisingWave an alternative to?: RisingWave is an open-source alternative to Striim, Estuary, Google Cloud Dataflow and Amazon Kinesis. Other open-source alternatives to Striim include Debezium, Kafka and Duckle.
Is RisingWave actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to RisingWave was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v3.1.0, published on 21 September 2026. The project has 9.4k stars on GitHub.