RudderStack-managed Plans vs. RudderStack Open Source

This guide compares the features available in RudderStack-managed plans (Free, Growth, and Enterprise) 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.

RudderStack-managed vs. RudderStack Open Source

• RudderStack-managed setup: RudderStack hosts both the control plane and data plane for you.

For a detailed breakdown of feature availability and limits across different RudderStack-managed plans, see Plan Comparison.

• RudderStack Open Source setup: You host the data plane and use the RudderStack-managed control plane to manage your source-destination configurations.

Comparison overview

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

Detailed feature comparison

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

Events-related features

Reverse ETL

Data governance

Deployment and security

The above deployment and security features are not available in all RudderStack-managed plans. See RudderStack Plans Comparison guide for details.

Monitoring and observability

Auditing and user management

Limits for the above auditing and user management features vary by RudderStack-managed plans. See RudderStack Plans Comparison guide for details.

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-managed 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-managed plans offer multiple sources, destinations, and key features like Live Events and Transformations.

See RudderStack Plans Comparison guide for a detailed breakdown of features and limits across plans.

RudderStack Open Source

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

1. Set up the data plane on Docker, Kubernetes, or in your own development environment. RudderStack will not host the data plane for you.

2. 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.