Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to DataForge Core – Pure functional SQL data transforms
Hey HN, A few friends and I have spent the past 6 years or so developing a way to write data transformation code in a way that can easily adapt to changes in logic or data elements both upstream and downstream without the need major refactoring, regression testing, or re-orchestration. We decided to open source the project about two months ago and published a CLI tool after we realized how big of a task it was to take on incumbents like stored procedures, dbt, and psyspark. It is early days for our community and we are looking to grow and engage with others to poke holes and contribute…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. DataForge Core – Pure functional SQL data transforms launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Long story short: We (Dataherald) just open-sourced our entire codebase, including the core engine, the clients that interact with it and the backend application layer for authentication and RBAC. You can now use the full solution to build text-to-SQL into your product. The Problem: modern LLMs write syntactically correct SQL, but they struggle with real-world relational data. This is because real world data and schema is messy, natural language can often be ambiguous and LLMs are not trained on your specific dataset. Solution: The core NL-to-SQL engine in Dataherald is an LLM based agent…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Every data pipeline job I had to tackle required quite a few components to set up: - One tool to ingest data - Another one to transform it - If you wanted to run Python, set up an orchestrator - If you need to check the data, a data quality tool Let alone this being hard to set up and taking time, it is also pretty high-maintenance. I had to do a lot of infra work, and while this being billable hours for me I didn’t enjoy the work at all. For some parts of it, there were nice solutions like dbt, but in the end for an end-to-end workflow, it didn’t work. That’s why I decided to build an…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
No-code visual data transformation software tool for Windows & Mac. Download a free trial.
2019 · easydatatransform.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Hi HN community, I’m Nick, co-founder/CEO of Transform.co. I’m thrilled to share MetricFlow, an open-source metric creation framework: https://github.com/transform-data/metricflow MetricFlow strives to make what has historically been an extremely repetitive process, writing SQL queries on core normalized data models, much more DRY. MetricFlow consolidates the definitions for joins, aggregations, filters, etc., and programmatically generates SQL to construct data marts. You can think of it like LookML, but more powerful and ergonomic (and open source!). The project…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Hi HN community. We are excited to open source Dataherald’s natural-language-to-SQL engine today (https://github.com/Dataherald/dataherald). This engine allows you to set up an API from your structured database that can answer questions in plain English. GPT-4 class LLMs have gotten remarkably good at writing SQL. However, out-of-the-box LLMs and existing frameworks would not work with our own structured data at a necessary quality level. For example, given the question “what was the average rent in Los Angeles in May 2023?” a reasonable human would either assume the…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
A pure ORM for writing native SQL queries yielding pure business objects - craigmichaelmartin/pure-orm
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Postgres-Backed Drop-in Temporal Replacement. Contribute to dbos-inc/dbosify-py development by creating an account on GitHub.
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Hey Show HN! I’m Toby and over the last few months, I’ve been working with a team of engineers from Airbnb, Apple, Google, and Netflix, to simplify developing data pipelines with SQLMesh (https://github.com/TobikoData/sqlmesh). We’re tired of fragile pipelines, untested SQL queries, and expensive staging environments for data. Software engineers have reaped the benefits of DevOps through unit tests, continuous integration, and continuous deployment for years. We felt like it was time for data teams to have the same confidence and efficiency in development as their peers.…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9
I've been exploring the (not so=) amazing potential of AI in coding and have compiled a list of tools. From AI-powered IDEs to code generators, this resource is my contribution to the community. I'm still on the fence about including txt2sql projects, as their functionality seems too basic to me. And I'm personally maintaining this, so your feedback is wellcome.
2025 · aicode.danvoronov.com · its alternatives →
- 10
LBADD: An experimental, distributed SQL database. Contribute to tomarrell/lbadd development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Hi HN, We're Anna, Adrian, Marcin and Matt, developers of dlt. dlt is an open source library to automatically create datasets out of messy, unstructured data sources. You can use the library to move data from about anywhere into most of well known SQL and vector stores, data lakes, storage buckets, or local engines like DuckDB. It automates many cumbersome data engineering tasks and can by handled by anyone who knows Python. Here’s our Github: https://github.com/dlt-hub/dlt Here’s our Colab demo:…
2023 · colab.research.google.com · its alternatives →
- 12
OpenSheet▲86Hi folks. I've been doing some experiments on how LLMs could get more handy in the day to day of working with files (CSV, Parquet, etc). Earlier last year, I built https://datakit.page and evolved it over and over into an all in-browser experience with help of duckdb-wasm. Got loads of feedbacks and I think it turned into a good shape with being an adhoc local data studio, but I kept hearing two main things/issues: Why can't the AI also change cells in the file we give to it? Why can't we modify this grid ourselves? So besides the whole READ and text-to-SQL flows, what seemed…
Feb 2026 · opensheet.app · its alternatives →
- 13
I'm Anand, co-founder and CTO of Altimate AI. My co-founder Pradnesh and I are open-sourcing Altimate Code. AMA. Why we built this: Pradnesh and I have been building tooling for data engineers for three years: dbt Power User and Datamates vscode extensions with combined 750k+ installs, running against real Fortune 500 data estates. The pattern we kept seeing: general-purpose agents can write SQL, but they have no model of what the SQL does. No lineage. No schema context. No understanding of what's in a dbt manifest. That's not a prompt problem; it's a missing tool layer problem. The numbers…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Hey HN, I am Alex. I am open sourcing Data Studio, a lightweight data exploration IDE in your browser that runs locally. Try it: https://local.dataspren.com (no account needed, runs locally) More information: https://github.com/dataspren-analytics/data-studio I love working with data (Postgres, SQL, DuckDB, DBT, Iceberg, ...). I always wanted a data exploration tool that runs in my browser and just works. Without any infra or privacy concerns (DuckDB UI came quite close). Features: - Data Notebooks - SQL cells work like DBT models (they materialize to views) -…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Hey HN — We're excited to share Trellis — a snowflake for unstructured data. We've built an AI engine that turns unstructured data into structured SQL-format based on the schema you define in natural language. We spent a lot of time building ML infrastructure and realized that most data warehouses and data pipelines are not designed for unstructured data (documents, PDFs, calls). While something like a Vector database and RAG are great at search tasks, they really struggle with aggregation and SQL type queries such as 1. How many emails in the past 6 months contain complaints about the…
2024 · demo.runtrellis.com · its alternatives →
- 16
A couple of years ago, we had an interesting idea. When a development team within an organization consists of around 10 members or fewer, controlling the risks associated with database changes might be achieved through trust and real-time communication. However, as the team grows, the responsibilities within the team become more specialized. Imagine a scenario where different branches of the business exist, each with its own set of developers, team leads, testers, testing leads, DBAs, and more. Relying solely on traditional communication methods becomes increasingly challenging when it comes…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
- 18RO
As a software engineer, it's frustrating to see those who can't code stuck with spreadsheets as their most powerful data tool. This is especially true when there is such a thin layer that exists to access arbitrarily powerful data and AI/ML tools (typically just Python and pandas/SQL). I built Regrail last year to demonstrate a visual, procedural tool that abstracts the primitives of data engineering. It uses a block-based editor that allows users to see the changes they are making to tables step by step. You can think of it like a visual DAG builder. I believe that data literacy…
2023 · regrail.io · its alternatives →
- 19GA
Hello HN! These last few months I've been working on my first open source project: an embedded database written in pure-go. That took me some months, as I had to learn how to deal with such large packages. Until then, all packages I had made were quite small an did not require much. I usually did not have to worry about things like allocation optimization and instance pools until This project. It started when I wanted to make a port of a tool to a TUI environment. I'm actually used to working with TUIs in golang, so that was my language of choice. The tool I wanted to port is written in…
Feb 2026 · its alternatives →
- 20
I'm a couple years late to the party but DuckDB is blowing my mind. I couldn't find an good embedded DuckDB stream processing solution so I hacked my own, calling it SQLFlow: https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow SQLFlow enables writing stream transformations in pure sql, executed using DuckDB. The goal was to create a lightweight, performant stream processing engine using pure SQL transformations, DuckDB didn't disappoint! I'd love your feedback, feature requests, impressions, or just comments. I'd love to turn this into a stable, usable project that people are…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21GC
Copilot has proven quite handy as a "smarter Intellisense" tool for me. It often accurately predicts the arguments I need for functions, including their types. Occasionally, when I start typing `a.map(`, it automatically fills in the transformation code I intended to write. The key enabler is the ability to ignore most suggestion. They don't get in my way. The simpler the task I'm working on, the higher the likelihood it gets it right. This is where I get the most benefit from Copilot, as I already understand what I'm coding, why I'm coding it, and how it should appear. Copilot sometimes…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 22
Write python locally, execute SQL in your data warehouse - rasgointelligence/RasgoQL
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Hey HN! Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on DataBridge, an open-source solution for data ingestion and querying across text, PDFs, images, and videos. In our latest update, we’ve added a fully local deployment option: - No internet required – Runs entirely offline. - Customizable Models – Supports any LLM and embedding model via Ollama (with options for any other private providers) - Extensibility – You can plug in your own models or tools easily. This local-first approach ensures better privacy, security, and flexibility, especially for teams dealing with sensitive data. You can…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24TD
Hey Everyone, I built https://querysimple.com, its a tool that allows you to transform data directly in the PostgreSQL with just SQL skills. - Creation of tables - Data syncs - Error and status reporting - Scheduling queries All of this is taken care by the application. You just write your select SQL queries. I would love some feedback from the community on the tool. You can watch a video demo, there is no need to signup. Of course, if you want to signup and give it a try that would be great!
2023 · querysimple.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- We open sourced our entire text-to-SQL product alternatives
- I built an open-source data pipeline tool in Go alternatives
- Transform Data Without Programming alternatives
- MetricFlow – open-source metric framework alternatives
- Dataherald AI – Natural Language to SQL Engine alternatives
- Write universally accessible SQL, not library-specific ORM wrapper APIs alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →