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Elementary comes in two offerings: an open-source package you host yourself, and a fully managed cloud platform. Which one fits depends on your goals, scale, and team setup. Elementary OSS A self-maintained, open-source CLI for teams running dbt. It requires a dbt project, and integrates with it through the Elementary dbt package. It covers a single dbt project with dbt test results, table-level lineage, test coverage, and basic alerting, all through the self-hosted Elementary observability report. Elementary Cloud A fully managed platform for data observability, quality, and governance, with no infrastructure to maintain. It connects directly to your data warehouse and does not require dbt, and covers your whole stack end to end - from ingestion through the warehouse and dbt to BI and AI consumption - across multiple projects, with column-level lineage, ML-powered detection, governance, and enterprise security built in. All of these signals feed the context engine that powers the Elementary AI agents and MCP. The agents work in the background while you supervise, and help you work at scale: they recommend tests, triage and resolve incidents, enrich governance metadata, and optimize costly models and tests. Through the MCP, the Elementary context is provided to other agents, like analytics and code agents, so they return more accurate results on trustworthy data.
No lock-in. Any dbt tests and configuration stay in your dbt project and code repository, and Cloud lets you manage tests and monitors from the UI or as code. OSS and Cloud share the same foundation, so you can move between them freely.

Not sure which one fits?

If you’re trying to decide what would work best, feel free to talk to the team.
Below is a detailed comparison between the OSS and Cloud features:

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Frequently asked questions

Elementary OSS is an open-source CLI and dbt package that you host yourself. It covers a single dbt project with dbt test results, table-level lineage, test coverage, and basic alerting. Elementary Cloud is a fully managed platform that adds ML-powered anomaly detection, column-level lineage up to BI, incident management, governance, enterprise security, and a team of AI agents you put to work at scale, across your whole stack, with no infrastructure to maintain.
For Elementary Cloud, no. You connect your data warehouse to get started, and Elementary monitors the databases and schemas you select. dbt is one popular integration, not a prerequisite — if you do use it, the Elementary dbt package adds automatic collection of your dbt test and run results on top.Elementary OSS does require dbt. It installs as a dbt package, and the CLI reads the schema that package creates in your warehouse.
Yes. Elementary OSS is open source and free to use. You install the dbt package and CLI in your own environment and run the observability report yourself.
Talk to the team and they’ll help set up Elementary and open an account for you. If you’re not sure whether OSS or Cloud fits your setup, they can help you decide too.
Yes. Cloud builds on the same open-source foundation and includes the OSS capabilities, then adds automated detection, lineage, governance, security, and AI agents on top.
Yes. If you use dbt, Cloud uses the same Elementary dbt package, so moving from OSS to Cloud means connecting your existing dbt project rather than starting over. You can also connect your data warehouse directly. See the dbt package quickstart.
No. Any dbt tests, monitors, and configuration stay in your dbt project and code repository, and Cloud lets you manage tests from the UI or as code. You keep full ownership and can move between OSS and Cloud freely.
Elementary Cloud is SOC 2 Type II certified and HIPAA compliant. It collects metadata, logs, and aggregated metrics only, with no read access to raw data in your warehouse. It supports RBAC, SSO, audit logs, and PrivateLink. See security and privacy for details.
Choose OSS for a free, self-hosted package on a single dbt project. Choose Cloud to cover multiple projects end to end with automated detection, governance, enterprise security, and AI agents you supervise at scale, without managing infrastructure. Still unsure? Talk to the team and we’ll help you decide.

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