CloudQuery vs Steampipe

Steampipe is using PostgreSQL Foreign data wrappers (opens in a new tab) to create a PostgreSQL abstraction on top of APIs.

Key Differences:

• CloudQuery uses an EL (Extract-Load) approach, which means supporting more databases and giving the user the ability to use any standard transformation tools such as dbt (opens in a new tab), and visualization tools on top of PostgreSQL (or any other supported database, for that matter).
• Database Agnostic: CloudQuery supports multiple databases such as PostgreSQL, BigQuery and others. This makes it play nicely with the whole SQL eco-system and gives you the ability to re-use other tools like Grafana/BI. Steampipe wraps PostgreSQL and while it allows you to expose it as a service, it limits your ability to use other BI tools.
• Steampipe can work better for small-scale live queries, but if you need to get all your cloud assets in one place in larger multi-account setups, CloudQuery is a more scalable approach. You can scale Ingestion, Storage, Transformation workloads independently for each step.