Elementary pricing guide details
Pricing Overview
Elementary follows a freemium pricing model anchored by its open-source dbt package and a tiered cloud platform. The open-source package is free under the Apache-2.0 license -- you can self-host it with no licensing cost, no seat limits, and no feature gates. This gives data engineering teams automated monitors, anomaly detection, data lineage, and a data quality dashboard at zero cost, as long as you handle your own infrastructure.
Elementary Cloud layers managed hosting, AI agents, and collaboration features on top of the open-source core. The cloud offering has three tiers -- Scale, Enterprise, and Unlimited -- all of which require contacting Elementary's sales team for pricing. There are no self-serve prices published for any cloud plan. Elementary also offers an AI Layer add-on with separate credit-based pricing. We see this as a genuine open-core model: the free tier is production-ready, not a crippled trial, and the cloud tiers add operational convenience and enterprise controls rather than gating core data quality functionality.
Plan Comparison
| Feature | Open Source (Free) | Scale | Enterprise | Unlimited |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 (self-hosted) | Contact sales | Contact sales | Contact sales |
| Editor seats | Unlimited | Up to 10 | Up to 20 | Unlimited |
| Viewer seats | N/A | N/A | Up to 40 | Unlimited |
| AI Agents | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Automated monitors | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Anomaly detection | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Column-level lineage | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Performance monitoring | Community | Yes | Yes | Yes | | BI integrations | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Incident management | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | | MCP Server | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Data health scores | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | | Catalog | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | | SSO and RBAC | No | No | Yes | Yes | | Advanced deployment options | No | No | Yes | Yes | | Dedicated CS engineer | No | No | No | Yes | | Tailored implementation and training | No | No | No | Yes | | External catalog integrations | No | No | No | Yes |
The jump from open source to Scale is where you gain managed AI agents, BI integrations, incident management, and a hosted catalog. Enterprise adds SSO, RBAC, and advanced deployment -- the typical governance gates that trigger an upgrade in mid-market organizations. Unlimited removes all seat and viewer caps and adds white-glove onboarding with a dedicated customer success engineer. We think the Scale-to-Enterprise upgrade is the real decision point for most teams: SSO and RBAC are non-negotiable in regulated industries, and Elementary locks them behind Enterprise.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
Elementary's cloud pricing has several cost factors to watch. All three cloud tiers charge extra for tables beyond their included limits, billed per additional 1,000 tables. The AI Layer add-on uses credit-based pricing that is entirely separate from your plan tier -- expect variable costs depending on how aggressively your team uses AI agents. Self-hosting the open-source package eliminates licensing costs but shifts compute, storage, and maintenance overhead to your team. Budget for dbt Cloud or dbt Core infrastructure costs alongside Elementary, since the tool depends on dbt as its foundation.
How Elementary Pricing Compares
Elementary occupies a unique position in the data quality and observability market as a genuinely free open-source option with an optional cloud upsell. This contrasts sharply with competitors that require paid plans for any production use.
| Tool | Pricing Model | Starting Price | Free Tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elementary | Freemium (open-core) | Contact sales (Cloud) | Yes, full open-source package |
| Alation | Enterprise | Quoted; no public rate | No |
| Secoda | Freemium | $99/mo | Yes (1 editor, 500 resources) |
| Snowplow | Usage-Based | $9/mo | No |
Alation targets large enterprises and publishes no rate; every deal is quoted. That is a fundamentally different buyer than Elementary's typical user. Secoda starts at $99 per month for its Premium plan and includes a limited free tier, but Secoda focuses more on data cataloging and discovery than dbt-native data quality monitoring. Snowplow starts at $9 per month but addresses behavioral data pipelines, not data observability.
Elementary's strongest competitive advantage is the open-source package. No other tool in this comparison gives you automated anomaly detection, column-level lineage, and a data quality dashboard at zero cost. If your team runs dbt and wants production-grade data observability without a vendor contract, the open-source path is hard to beat. The cloud tiers make sense once you need managed AI agents, BI integrations, and enterprise access controls -- but you will need to negotiate pricing directly with Elementary's sales team since no public rates exist for any cloud plan.