Steampipevs
Infracost
Infracost: Costing infrastructure from code rather than querying what is deployed
Steampipe
Query cloud APIs, SaaS tools and code with SQL, with no extract or load step
As of 31 August 2026, Steampipe has a free plan and paid plans start at $49/month. An AGPL-licensed engine that makes cloud provider APIs queryable as Postgres tables, from a bootstrapped fifteen-person company, with a breaking unbundling in its recent history. Softwr lists it under Developer Tools. Steampipe is made by Turbot HQ, Inc, available on macOS, Linux, Windows, Docker.
Overview
What Steampipe does
Steampipe embeds Postgres and a foreign data wrapper so that cloud provider APIs, SaaS tools, code repositories and configuration files can be queried with ordinary SQL. There is no extract and load step: a query against an AWS plugin calls the AWS API at query time and returns rows. That makes it well suited to security posture questions, compliance evidence and inventory work where the answer must reflect the account right now rather than the last sync. The licensing needs stating precisely because it is often described wrongly. Steampipe moved to AGPL-3.0 in May 2021, roughly four months after it went public, which is years before the Business Source Licence wave that reshaped this category. It is a settled position rather than a recent change of terms. Powerpipe, Flowpipe and Tailpipe are AGPL too; the plugins are Apache 2.0 for code with documentation under a non-commercial licence. Many organisations forbid AGPL outright, and the network clause reaches anyone putting a web interface in front of it. The disruptive event in its history was structural rather than legal. Dashboards, benchmarks and mods were unbundled into a separate product, Powerpipe, and removed from Steampipe entirely at version 1.0 in October 2024, so the check, dashboard, mod and variable commands no longer exist. Anyone reading older documentation or a pre-2024 tutorial is reading about a product that has since been split in two.
What people use it for
- Security teams answering posture questions against live cloud accounts rather than a nightly export
- Compliance evidence gathering where the answer must reflect the account at the moment it is asked
- Inventory and drift questions spanning several cloud providers in one query
- Engineers who would rather write SQL than learn each provider command line tool
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Steampipe.
- AGPL-3.0 across all four engines is a procurement blocker at organisations that ban the licence outright, and the network clause reaches any internal portal or service that puts a web interface in front of it.
- Dashboards, benchmarks and mods were removed from Steampipe entirely at version 1.0 in October 2024 and now live in a separate product, so pre-2024 documentation and tutorials describe commands that no longer exist.
- Live querying is bound by cloud provider API rate limits and keeps no persistent store by default, which is why a separate DuckDB-backed product exists for log volumes and why large accounts return slowly.
- The company is fifteen people and bootstrapped, maintaining four command line tools plus a hosted service plus two further products, and the newer tools have thin community traction relative to that surface area.
- Hosted tiers include only three users regardless of tier, with additional Enterprise users charged separately, so a team of thirty costs an order of magnitude more than the headline figure before compute and storage are counted.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Steampipe
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- SteampipevsGrafana
Grafana: Where the requirement is dashboards over existing metrics rather than live API queries
Pricing
What Steampipe costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Steampipe CLI
Free
- AGPL-3.0
- All plugins
- No user or query limits
- Community support
Pipes Developer
Free
- One user
- 400 compute minutes
- 3GB storage
Pipes Team
$49 /mo
- Three users
- 2,000 compute minutes
- 20GB storage
- Shared workspaces and role based access
Pipes Enterprise
$249 /mo
- Three users
- 10,000 compute minutes
- 100GB storage
- SAML and directory sync
- Additional users charged separately
Capabilities
Features
SQL over live APIs
Cloud and SaaS APIs presented as Postgres tables and queried at request time
Wide plugin set
Over a hundred and fifty data sources across cloud providers, SaaS tools and code
Embedded Postgres
A single binary with the database and foreign data wrapper included
Compliance benchmarks
Security and compliance controls, now delivered through Powerpipe rather than Steampipe
Joins across providers
A single query spanning AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and SaaS tools
Hosted option
Turbot Pipes for shared workspaces, scheduling and access control
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
When did Steampipe become AGPL?
May 2021, about four months after the project went public. It is a settled licence rather than a recent change, and predates the Business Source Licence wave it is often confused with.
Where did the dashboards and benchmarks go?
Into Powerpipe. They were deprecated in March 2024 and removed from Steampipe at version 1.0 in October 2024, so the check, dashboard, mod and variable commands are gone.
Is it fast on a large cloud estate?
Not always. Queries call provider APIs at request time, so rate limits rather than query planning set the pace, and there is no persistent store by default.
Does the AGPL affect internal use?
Running it internally for your own analysis is fine. Putting a web interface in front of it that other people use is where the network clause becomes a question for your legal team.
Is a bootstrapped vendor a risk?
It cuts both ways. There is no investor pressure toward a licence change or an exit, and there are also fifteen people supporting a large product surface.
Keep looking
Where to go from Steampipe
- Steampipe alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Steampipe pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Steampipe badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Developer Tools softwareThe full category
- Best Developer Tools softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Developer Tools software for
Compare Steampipe with
- Atlantis
- Jitsu
- Frappe
- Visual Studio Code
- Penpot
- GNU Emacs
- Bazel
- Eclipse IDE
- Pants Build
- Swagger UI
- Ansible
- Helix
- JFrog Artifactory
- Namespace
- Nix
- Nixpacks
- Octopus Deploy
- Okteto
Other Developer Tools software
Runs Terraform plan and apply from pull request comments, self-hosted and free
Open source12 researched notesOpen source event pipeline that streams behavioural data to your own warehouse
Free, then $99/mo12 researched notesThe Python web framework behind ERPNext, sold as managed hosting through Frappe Cloud
Free, then $5/mo12 researched notesExtensible, customizable free text editor and computing environment
Free plan12 researched notesOpen-source, extensible IDE historically centered on Java development
Free plan12 researched notesFast, scalable build system with intelligent defaults for Python and more
Free plan10 researched notesPurely functional package manager and the NixOS distribution built on it, for byte-reproducible environments
Open source12 researched notesBuild system that turns a source directory into an OCI image, now in maintenance mode
Open source12 researched notesRuns production-like development environments on your own Kubernetes cluster
Free plan12 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Steampipe, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Steampipe
Steampipe alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Steampipe pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Steampipe
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Steampipe badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Best Developer Tools software alternatives
Internal developer portal that scores service ownership and maturity rather than just cataloguing services
quote
Feature flag service priced per flag and environment with unlimited seats and unlimited monthly active users
Per month by feature flag and environment count
Programmable CI/CD engine that runs your pipeline as containers on any runner
Per month per team for Dagger Cloud
Event gateway that receives, queues, retries and replays inbound webhooks
Per month by delivered event count
Analytics governance: define a tracking plan, generate typed code from it, and catch drift before release
Per editor seat per month
Kubernetes development and testing automation with shared caching, now owned by Incredibuild
Open source, no licence feeThe Python web framework behind ERPNext, sold as managed hosting through Frappe Cloud
Per month by site or server
Open source internal developer portal framework created and open sourced by Spotify
Open source, no licence fee