The Airbyte alternative
without the ops overhead.

The experience is the difference. With Airbyte you configure each connector and schedule, and typically wire up external orchestration. With rsync.ai you describe the pipeline in plain English, it discovers the schema, scans for likely personal data, and asks you to approve the plan before anything runs. rsync.ai is live as a managed cloud today — start free, nothing to provision — and also generates new connectors from an API's docs URL with AI (rsync.ai Cloud), plus Ask rsync.ai, an assistant that writes SQL from a plain-English question for you to review, with models, workflows, charts and dashboards on top of the data it lands. Self-hosting is available now under the rsync.ai Source-Available License, so you can run pipelines on your own infrastructure with auditable code.

No — Airbyte's catalog is larger and more established, with hundreds of community and certified connectors built up over years. rsync.ai ships a smaller core that is live today: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, and MongoDB with real-time CDC, Shopify, Google Sheets, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, and the BigQuery and Databricks warehouses. Snowflake, Redshift, Stripe, and GitHub are in preview. The difference in approach: instead of maintaining a giant catalog, rsync.ai generates a connector on demand from any REST or GraphQL API's documentation on rsync.ai Cloud, which covers the long tail without waiting for someone to publish it.

For teams that don't already run Kubernetes, usually yes — self-hosting is available now. Airbyte deprecated its Docker Compose self-host path; self-managed Airbyte now runs on Kubernetes, through abctl (which creates a local kind cluster) or Helm, on top of its own web server, workers, scheduler, and database. rsync.ai brings up the full stack — pipelines, CDC, the AI services, and the SQL Explorer — with a single install command that runs it via Docker Compose in your own VPC (a Kubernetes Helm chart is in preview). If your team already runs Kubernetes and Airbyte, the gap is smaller. Prefer not to self-host at all? rsync.ai Cloud is live today and free to start, with nothing to provision.

For PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, and MongoDB, yes — rsync.ai uses log-based CDC the same way Airbyte's CDC sources do, capturing inserts, updates, and deletes continuously with no polling. You point rsync.ai at the source, it takes an initial snapshot, and then streams changes. MongoDB documents land as an _id column plus one JSON column (JSONB on PostgreSQL), not flattened typed columns. For non-CDC sources, you use a live connector, one in preview, or generate one from the API docs on rsync.ai Cloud.

rsync.ai is source-available under the rsync.ai Source-Available License: free to read, modify, and self-host for your company's own internal use (or non-commercial use). Reselling it, hosting it for others as a service, or building it into a product you sell needs a commercial license, and you can charge for your own install and support work. Airbyte also uses a mix of licenses — its platform is under the Elastic License 2.0, with other components (including the Airbyte Protocol) under MIT. The source-available code and the right to run and audit it on your own infrastructure ship with self-hosting; rsync.ai Cloud is also live and free to start.

Yes. Recreate each source and destination in rsync.ai by describing it in plain English, run the new pipeline alongside your existing Airbyte sync, and compare row counts. Both capture changes through log-based CDC, so table contents should line up, though column naming and MongoDB document layout can differ — check a sample before you switch. Once validated, disable the Airbyte connection.