dbt 37,942 Labs previewed a ground-up rewrite as the dbt Fusion engine and has shipped it as dbt v2, which its documentation now calls the current generation and the default install. It is written in Rust, ships as one self-contained binary with no Python runtime, parses SQL natively in each engine's dialect (so it catches a wrong column name before sending the query), and writes its artifacts as Parquet 129 . Licensing has two layers. The source on the dbt-labs/dbt-core main branch is Apache 2.0; the dbt distribution adds dbt-specific features under the proprietary dbt Product Licensing Agreement, which forbids reverse engineering it or circumventing its access controls. Both are free to use, and some editor features unlock after a free dbt platform login.
| PyPI 2,431 package | Latest (Oct 2026) | What it is | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| dbt-core + adapter | 1.12.5 | Python engine (v1), Transforming Data with dbt | Apache 2.0 |
| dbt | 2.0.6 | v2 binary, full feature set | dbt Product Licensing Agreement |
| dbt-oss | 2.0.5 | v2 subset, open-source code only | Apache 2.0 |
v2 needs no separate adapter packages, and the dbt-core page warns that its PyPI namespace will be deprecated in the long term. dbt Labs and Fivetran 16,237 announced their merger on 13 October 2025, promising that dbt Core and Fusion would keep their licences.