RudderStack Features Comparison Guide

Compare features and setup options in RudderStack’s free and paid plans against RudderStack Open Source.

4 minute read

This guide compares the features available in a RudderStack-hosted setup (Free, Starter, Growth, and Enterprise plans) against a self-hosted RudderStack Open Source deployment.

Use this guide to decide which setup fits your environment and data needs, especially if you’re evaluating RudderStack in a build vs. buy context.

See the Glossary to understand the key difference between self-hosted and RudderStack-hosted setups.

Comparison overview

Some advanced RudderStack features are not supported in RudderStack Open Source.

Feature	Description	RudderStack plans	RudderStack Open Source
Events	Features related to tracking, collecting, and routing your events.
Reverse ETL	Send data from your warehouse to third-party platforms.
Data Governance	Investigate and troubleshoot inconsistencies in your event data.
Deployment and security	Scale and secure your RudderStack deployment.
Monitoring and observability	Monitor your data pipelines using different tools and alerting mechanisms.
Audits and user management	Manage users and set access controls for various RudderStack features.

Detailed feature comparison

See the following sections for a detailed comparison of the features available in the various RudderStack plans and RudderStack Open Source.

Feature	RudderStack Open Source	Notes
Event metrics	❗	Get information on the number of events ingested during a specified timeframe. Applicable only for cloud mode destinations. For RudderStack Open Source, this feature is available only in the RudderStack-hosted control plane.
Event backup in your own bucket		RudderStack can manage it for you as a part of the Enterprise plan.
Live Events	❗	For RudderStack Open Source, this feature is available only in the RudderStack-hosted control plane. Applicable only for cloud mode destinations.
RudderStack-managed object storage		Use the RudderStack-hosted object storage to temporarily store your events before forwarding them to your warehouse destination. RudderStack does not persist any of this data.
Event Replay		Available in the RudderStack Enterprise plan.
Maintaining event ordering		Available in the RudderStack Enterprise plan. Crucial for a multi-node RudderStack setup
Transformations		For RudderStack Open Source, available only in the RudderStack-hosted control plane and users can set up to 5 transformations. RudderStack Free and Starter plan users can set up to 5 transformations in the cloud mode. Growth and Enterprise plan users can create unlimited transformations. Only Enterprise users can create transformations in the device mode.

Reverse ETL

Feature	RudderStack plans	RudderStack Open Source	Notes
Reverse ETL			Free and Starter plan users can set up 1 Reverse ETL source. Growth and Enterprise users can set up unlimited sources.
Data syncs scheduling			-
Models			-

Data governance

Feature	RudderStack plans	RudderStack Open Source	Notes
Data governance			-
Tracking plans			-
Data regulation and suppression			Available in the RudderStack Enterprise plan.

Deployment and security

Feature	RudderStack plans	RudderStack Open Source	Notes
Multi-node scaling			This is a RudderStack Enterprise feature.
Single sign-on (SSO)			This is a RudderStack Enterprise feature.
VPC deployment			This is a RudderStack Enterprise feature.

Monitoring and observability

Feature	RudderStack plans	RudderStack Open Source
Grafana dashboards for monitoring
Alerting and error notifications

Auditing and user management

Feature	RudderStack plans	RudderStack Open Source	Notes
Invite team members to your workspace			You can invite up to 10 members to your workspace in RudderStack Free and Starter plan. No invitation limit in the Growth and Enterprise plan.
Audit Logs			Available in the RudderStack Enterprise plan.

Setup comparison

To understand the effort involved in setting up RudderStack, it’s helpful to take a look at RudderStack’s architecture — comprising the control plane and the data plane. These two components work together to govern the data flow between your event sources and destinations.

The control plane refers to the front-end RudderStack dashboard where you can manage the configuration of your sources and destinations.
The data plane is RudderStack’s core engine responsible for receiving event data and transforming it into the required destination format before relaying events to the destination.

RudderStack dashboard

In the RudderStack dashboard, you get a RudderStack-hosted data plane and control plane so you need not worry about the setup. You can set up a source and destination and see the events flow within minutes.

RudderStack’s Free plan offers multiple sources, destinations and delivery of 250,000 events per month. It also provides key features like Live Events and Transformations.

If you start on the Free plan, it’s also much easier to convert to a paid plan as your needs evolve over time.

RudderStack Open Source

For RudderStack Open Source, you have the following data plane and control plane setup options:

Set up the data plane on Docker, Kubernetes, or in your own development environment. RudderStack will not host the data plane for you.
Use the RudderStack-hosted control plane (Recommended).

You can also self-host your source-destination configurations by setting up your own control plane using Control Plane Lite. However, note that:
Control Plane Lite is now deprecated and not supported for the latest rudder-server versions (after v1.2).
Cloud-based features like Transformations and Live Events are not available if you use the Control Plane Lite utility.