APIs · head to head
Formance vs OpenEBS
Formance
APIs
Open source double-entry ledger and payment orchestration for money-moving software
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
The short version
- Each has a real cost: Formance formance holds no money and provides no regulatory cover, so it must be paired with a payments provider or bank, and buyers occasionally mistake a ledger for a treasury system and discover the gap late.; OpenEBS there is no vendor on the other end of an incident unless you separately contract DataCore, so an outage at three in the morning is resolved by your own team and a public Slack channel.
- They diverge on capability: Formance covers Double-entry ledger, OpenEBS covers Replicated engine.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 1 September 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Formance and OpenEBS actually diverge.
Identical on both: starting price (Free), pricing model (Open source, no licence fee), free tier (Yes), user rating (Not yet rated).
What each one covers
Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.
Only in Formance
- Double-entry ledger
- Numscript transaction DSL
- Multi-currency
- Payments connectivity
- Reconciliation
- Self-hosted deployment
- Cloud offering
- API and SDKs
Only in OpenEBS
- Replicated engine
- Local PV engines
- Kubernetes-native management
- Snapshots and clones
- No licence fee
- Hardware independence
What people use each for
The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.
Formance
- A marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditablenot OpenEBS
- A fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an auditnot OpenEBS
- A payments team that wants one normalised model across several PSPs so reconciliation is not written separately for eachnot OpenEBS
- A company that wants its ledger under a licence it can keep running even if the vendor disappearsnot OpenEBS
OpenEBS
- Running Cassandra or Kafka on Kubernetes where the application already replicates and node-local volumes are sufficientnot Formance
- A platform team that needs persistent volumes on bare metal Kubernetes without a per node subscriptionnot Formance
- An edge or lab deployment where a commercial storage licence cannot be justifiednot Formance
- Replacing hostpath volumes with something that has snapshots and a Container Storage Interface drivernot Formance
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
Formance
- Formance holds no money and provides no regulatory cover, so it must be paired with a payments provider or bank, and buyers occasionally mistake a ledger for a treasury system and discover the gap late.
- Numscript is a domain-specific language your team must learn, and while it makes complex splits expressible it also means transaction logic sits outside the languages your engineers already debug well.
- Self-hosting a ledger that must never lose or duplicate a transaction is a serious operational commitment covering backups, upgrades and Postgres tuning, which is real cost the zero licence fee hides.
- Enterprise pricing is not published, so the difference between the free path and the supported path cannot be evaluated without a sales conversation.
- The company is much smaller than the incumbent alternatives, and while the MIT licence protects the code it does not protect the roadmap, so features on the hosted side may arrive slowly or change direction.
OpenEBS
- There is no vendor on the other end of an incident unless you separately contract DataCore, so an outage at three in the morning is resolved by your own team and a public Slack channel.
- The project has several storage engines with different maturity and different operational characteristics, and choosing the wrong one for your workload produces poor results that look like a product failure.
- Documentation and upgrade guidance assume real Kubernetes storage knowledge, so teams without that expertise underestimate the operational load they are taking on.
- Project governance shifted after DataCore acquired MayaData in 2021, which means the direction of a supposedly neutral project is influenced by one commercial sponsor.
- Disaster recovery, cross-cluster replication and policy-driven data services are thinner than in the commercial alternatives, so organisations with those requirements end up building them or buying a product anyway.
Pricing, plan by plan
Formance
Free- Open SourceFree
- MIT licensed core ledger
- Numscript transaction DSL
- Multi-currency tracking
- Enterprise$undefined/year
- Managed or private deployment
- Payments connectivity and reconciliation
- Support with response commitments
OpenEBS
Free- OpenEBSFree
- Apache 2.0 licensed
- All storage engines included
- No node or capacity limits
Which should you pick?
Choose Formance if
- You need double-entry ledger.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API.
- You also want numscript transaction dsl.
Choose OpenEBS if
- You need replicated engine.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Linux.
- You also want local pv engines.
Questions people ask
- Is Formance or OpenEBS better?
- Neither clearly leads. Formance starts at Free and OpenEBS at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Formance or OpenEBS?
- Formance starts at Free and OpenEBS at Free.
- Does Formance or OpenEBS run on more platforms?
- Formance runs on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API. OpenEBS runs on Linux.
- Can I use Formance for free?
- Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
- What is Formance best used for?
- Formance is most often used for a marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditable, a fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an audit, a payments team that wants one normalised model across several psps so reconciliation is not written separately for each, a company that wants its ledger under a licence it can keep running even if the vendor disappears. Of those, a marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditable and a fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an audit are not what OpenEBS is typically brought in for.
- What can Formance do that OpenEBS cannot?
- Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Numscript transaction DSL, Multi-currency, Payments connectivity. OpenEBS covers Replicated engine, Local PV engines, Kubernetes-native management, Snapshots and clones.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
Formance: Is Formance really open source?
Yes. The core ledger is MIT licensed with full source access and no deployment restrictions.
OpenEBS: Who supports it in production?
The project is community supported. Commercial support is available from DataCore, which acquired the original sponsor MayaData in 2021. Establish that relationship before production, not during an incident.
Formance: Does Formance move money?
No. It records and orchestrates movements; the actual payments happen at a PSP or bank you connect.
OpenEBS: Which engine should we use?
If your application replicates its own data, use a Local engine and avoid replicating twice. If it does not, such as with PostgreSQL, use the Replicated engine.
Formance: What does the enterprise version cost?
Not published. It is an annual subscription quoted per customer.
OpenEBS: Does it cost anything?
No licence fee. The cost is operational, and a support contract if you want someone accountable.
Formance: Do I have to use Numscript?
Yes for anything beyond the simplest transfers. It is how multi-party transactions are expressed atomically.
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