About SeaTunnel
SeaTunnel is a production-grade integration layer for distributed data systems, offering fault tolerance, schema evolution, and multi-engine execution across batch, streaming, CDC, multimodal, and AI workloads. It supports three execution engines: Zeta, Flink, and Spark.
The tool follows an EtLT pattern, handling extract, lightweight transform, and load, while allowing downstream systems to handle heavy transformations. It connects to various upstream sources and downstream targets, including databases, streaming platforms, and data warehouses.
Key features
- Automatic schema evolution detection and propagation
- Real-time CDC with low latency and batch-to-stream handoff
- Exactly-once semantics with checkpoint-based fault tolerance
- Multi-engine execution (Zeta, Flink, Spark)
- Support for batch, streaming, and CDC modes
Good fit for
- Moving data between OLTP databases and data warehouses
- Streaming data ingestion from Kafka or Pulsar to lakehouses
- Synchronizing schema changes across systems
SeaTunnel: questions and answers
- What is SeaTunnel used for?
- SeaTunnel is a distributed, high-performance data integration tool supporting batch, streaming, CDC, and multi-engine execution. It is a good fit for moving data between OLTP databases and data warehouses, streaming data ingestion from Kafka or Pulsar to lakehouses, and synchronizing schema changes across systems.
- Is SeaTunnel open source?
- Yes. SeaTunnel is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at apache/seatunnel and is written mainly in Java.
- Is SeaTunnel free?
- Yes. SeaTunnel is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host SeaTunnel?
- Yes. SeaTunnel can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is SeaTunnel an alternative to?
- SeaTunnel is an open-source alternative to Fivetran. Other open-source alternatives to Fivetran include Airbyte, Duckle and Dozer.
- Is SeaTunnel actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to SeaTunnel was on 13 October 2026, and the latest release is v3.0.0, published on 29 September 2026. The project has 9.7k stars on GitHub.
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