Soda vs Great Expectations Pricing and Licenses After GX Cloud Closed

Great Expectations is the cheaper choice on license: GX Core is free and still Apache-2.0, now stewarded by Fivetran. Soda is the only one of the two you can still buy as a hosted product: Soda Cloud is free to start and $750 a month on Team, while GX Cloud stopped taking public customers on 1 June 2026 after FICO acquired it. So the real choice in late 2026 is between running GX Core yourself and paying Soda for the hosted layer, and the license on Soda's own engine changed too, which is where most comparisons go out of date.

Most "Soda vs Great Expectations" articles still compare two open-source libraries with a cloud tier each. Two events this year broke that symmetry. In January 2026 Soda Core 4 moved from Apache-2.0 to the Elastic License. In May 2026 Great Expectations split in two: FICO took GX Cloud, Fivetran took GX Core. Below is what each option costs now, what you get for it, and which one to pick for your team.

Soda vs Great Expectations pricing at a glance

Prices read from soda.io/pricing and greatexpectations.io/pricing on 30 September 2026. The dated breakdown for the GX side, including the ownership split and the release record since May, is on Great Expectations pricing.

Is Great Expectations free?

Yes, GX Core is free. It is an Apache-2.0 Python library, and Fivetran, which announced its stewardship on 13 May 2026, has kept shipping it: 13 releases on PyPI between 5 May and 25 September 2026, eleven of them after the handover. What you do not get for free any more is the hosted layer. GX Cloud stored results, drew the dashboards and sent the alerts, and it has not been publicly available since 1 June.

That matters for budgeting. A team that planned to "start on GX Core and move to GX Cloud when we grow" no longer has that second step. The growth path is now to build the hosting yourself or buy it from a different vendor.

Is Soda Core still open source?

Not in the OSI sense. The LICENSE file in the soda-core repository was replaced on 28 January 2026 in the commit titled "V4 release", and the new text is the Elastic License 2.0. The 3.x releases on PyPI carry the Apache classifier; soda-core 4.25.0, uploaded 23 September 2026, declares its license as "Proprietary" and carries no OSI classifier. You can still read the source and run it, but the Elastic License restricts offering it as a managed service and forbids working around license-key functionality.

For most internal data teams that restriction changes nothing day to day. It does change procurement: if your legal team signs off on "open-source, OSI-approved" and nothing else, Soda Core 4 no longer fits that box, and GX Core still does. The full license trail is on Soda alternatives.

How much does Soda cost?

Soda publishes three plans. Free is $0 a month and includes Soda Processing Units, pipeline testing, metrics observability and alerting and ticketing integrations, with no credit card. Team is $750 a month and adds unlimited users, pay-as-you-go processing units beyond the allowance, and catalog integrations. Enterprise is custom and is where collaborative data contracts, the no-code interface, audit logs, custom roles and RBAC, private deployment, SSO and premium support sit. Annual billing and volume discounts are offered at that level.

Two things to check before you sign. First, the processing-unit rate is not printed, so ask for it in writing and model a month with your real check volume. Second, if data contracts are why you are looking at Soda, they are an Enterprise feature, not a Team one, which turns a $9,000-a-year decision into a quote.

What did GX Cloud cost, and what happens to its users?

GX Cloud listed Developer as free (5 validated data assets a month, up to 3 users), Team as "Custom" for up to 10 users, and Enterprise as "Custom" with a 99.5% uptime SLA. It never printed a paid price. A "$499 a month for 5 users" figure circulates on third-party guides, but it appears on no Great Expectations page we could find and it does not match the published 10-user Team cap.

Existing GX Cloud customers were told about timelines directly. The public signal is blunt: the pricing page still shows "Get started for free", while app.greatexpectations.io returned NXDOMAIN when we checked on 30 September 2026. If your team was on GX Cloud, your Expectations are portable because they are GX Core objects. What you have to replace is the results store, Data Docs hosting, scheduling and alert routing.

Is Soda better than Great Expectations?

Soda is better if you want a hosted product you can buy today and you prefer writing checks in YAML. Great Expectations is better if you want an OSI-licensed engine with the most flexible Python API and you are willing to host results yourself. Neither is a lineage or change-impact tool, so for "what breaks if this column changes", you need something alongside either one.

Here is how that plays out by team shape:

• Small team, a few dozen tables, Python-heavy. GX Core in your orchestrator, results written to a warehouse table, failures posted to Slack from the Checkpoint action. Cost: $0 license plus a few days of setup.
• Analytics engineers who live in SQL and YAML. Soda Free, then Team at $750 a month once you need more users or processing. You get a hosted UI without building one.
• Regulated team whose legal review requires OSI licenses. GX Core, or dbt tests. Soda Core 4 no longer qualifies.
• Former GX Cloud customer. Keep the Expectations in GX Core, and buy the hosted monitoring layer separately rather than rewriting every check in SodaCL.

Soda vs Great Expectations for a 12-person data team

Take a team of 12 engineers and analysts watching 150 production tables, most of them dbt models on Snowflake. At list, over one year:

Warehouse compute is on top in every row, because both engines push queries down to Snowflake. The GX-only row looks free, but on-call is where the hidden cost lives: when a check fails at 2 a.m., someone has to know which owner to wake. If your team already runs incident management software that pages the right engineer, point your Checkpoint and Soda alerts there rather than a shared Slack channel nobody reads overnight.

Which to buy after GX Cloud closed

If you are starting fresh and want a hosted product with a price on the page, Soda is the straightforward buy, and the Free plan is a real way to try it. If you already have a library of Expectations, do not rewrite them. Keep GX Core, which Fivetran is actively maintaining, and add only the hosted pieces you lost.

That is where DataTrail fits. It is not an assertion framework. It connects read-only to Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks or Postgres and builds column-level lineage from query history and your dbt project, then runs freshness monitoring and schema change alerts on every table without a test per table. When a GX or Soda check fails, impact analysis shows which models and dashboards are downstream. Team is $179 a month billed yearly with unlimited team members, and the rest of the plans are on the pricing page.

For the wider field, including Monte Carlo, Metaplane and Bigeye with their published prices, see data quality tools and data validation tools, and for the honest limits of replacing GX with a monitoring tool, Great Expectations alternatives.

Frequently asked questions

Is Great Expectations cheaper than Soda?

On license, yes. GX Core is $0 under Apache-2.0, and Soda's hosted Team plan is $750 a month. On total cost it depends on who hosts results and alerts: with GX Cloud gone, running Great Expectations at team scale means building that layer yourself or buying it from another vendor.

Can I still sign up for GX Cloud?

No. Great Expectations said GX Cloud "will no longer be publicly available beginning June 1" 2026 after FICO acquired it. The pricing page still shows a free Developer tier, but the GX Cloud app host did not resolve when we checked on 30 September 2026.

Does Soda have a free plan?

Yes. Soda Free is $0 a month with no credit card and includes processing units, pipeline testing, metrics observability and alerting integrations. Team at $750 a month adds unlimited users and pay-as-you-go processing, and data contracts are in Enterprise.

Can Soda read my Great Expectations suites?

Not directly. Soda checks are written in SodaCL YAML or as data contracts, and Great Expectations suites are Python or JSON Expectation objects. Moving means rewriting each check, which is why teams with a large GX library usually keep GX Core and add hosted monitoring beside it.

Who maintains Great Expectations now?

Fivetran stewards GX Core and the open-source community after the May 2026 announcement, and the GitHub repository now resolves to fivetran/great_expectations. FICO owns GX Cloud, the former hosted product, and is folding it into FICO Platform.