§ Pricing · Quality & testing

Elementary pricing.

Free open source · self-hosted

Elementary's core is open source and free to self-host; the vendor monetizes a managed offering (Elementary Cloud paid Team and Enterprise tiers — no published USD figure). There is no published USD rate for the paid tiers — expect a sales conversation for the managed product. A free tier exists.

Sales-led Free tier Free self-host

The numbers

What's verifiable.

Pricing model open core

Charged per per seat

Published ○ Contact sales required

Free tier ● Yes

Free self-host ● Available

Free tier OSS Apache-2.0 version (Elementary OSS) is fully featured for single-project use, no quota. Elementary Cloud has a free tier; paid Cloud tiers are not published.

Sales-only tier Elementary Cloud paid Team and Enterprise tiers — no published USD figure

The model

How open core pricing works.

How it's charged

The core engine is open source and free to run yourself. The vendor sells a managed cloud, plus features that only exist in the paid layer (SSO, RBAC, support, hosted UI).

What to watch

The line between core and paid moves over time. Check which capabilities you rely on are actually in the OSS repo, not just demoed from the cloud product.

Alternatives by price

Same cluster, ranked by entry cost.

dbt-expectations OSS · free Open-source dbt package adding 50+ Great Expectations-style assertions as native dbt tests that run in your own warehouse. pricing vs Elementary

Great Expectations OSS · free Python-native data validation framework — the OSS standard, now in stewardship transition after the May 2026 acquisition. pricing vs Elementary

Soda From $750 YAML-first data contracts and observability — SodaCL plus Soda Cloud, with anomaly detection and a self-hosted Kubernetes runner. pricing vs Elementary

Datafold From $799 Pre-merge data diffing and column-level lineage — the tool that shifts data quality left into the pull request. pricing vs Elementary

Metaplane Published, usage-based ML-powered, no-code data observability for the dbt and warehouse stack with automatic column-level lineage — now Metaplane by Datadog. pricing vs Elementary

Acceldata Contact sales Enterprise data observability with ML data quality, reconciliation, and a built-in catalog — strong on hybrid and on-prem estates. pricing vs Elementary

Anomalo Contact sales GUI-first ML anomaly detection at petabyte scale — pivoting in 2026 around agentic AI and unstructured-data monitoring. pricing vs Elementary

Bigeye Contact sales Enterprise data observability with Autometrics ML thresholds — repositioning in 2026 as an AI Trust Platform with runtime governance. pricing vs Elementary

Monte Carlo Contact sales Warehouse-side data observability for teams whose problems are upstream of dbt — ingestion, streaming, and across the full pipeline. pricing vs Elementary

Sifflet Contact sales EU-built full-stack data observability pairing ML-driven monitoring with an embedded catalog and field-level lineage. pricing vs Elementary

Ranked by published entry price — sales-led tools sort last because their floor is unverifiable. For capability-ranked substitutes, see all Elementary alternatives, scored.

Common questions

Asked about Elementary pricing.

Does Elementary publish pricing?

No. Elementary is sales-led with no published rates. Elementary Cloud paid Team and Enterprise tiers — no published USD figure.

Does Elementary have a free tier?

Yes. OSS Apache-2.0 version (Elementary OSS) is fully featured for single-project use, no quota. Elementary Cloud has a free tier; paid Cloud tiers are not published.

Can you run Elementary for free by self-hosting?

Yes — Elementary can be self-hosted at no license cost. The OSS project and the Cloud product are built by the same team and share the same detection engine. Cloud adds a hosted UI, managed scheduling, incident management, multi-project rollups, and SSO. For single-team dbt projects the OSS version is often sufficient indefinitely; Cloud becomes compelling at the point where you're coordinating multiple data teams or need non- engineers to triage incidents.

What's the cheapest alternative to Elementary?

Among the 10 same-cluster alternatives indexed here, dbt-expectations has the lowest entry cost (oss · free). Ranking is by published entry price; sales-led tools may quote anywhere.

Where these numbers come from.

Every figure above traces to public sources — the vendor's own pricing page where one exists, marketplace listings and third-party spend data where it doesn't. Verified 2026·04·25. The full capability spec lives on the Elementary tool page.

Pricing changes faster than any index. Notice something stale? Send a correction.

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