Step-by-step Atlas walkthroughs
Database-specific Atlas guides
Wire Atlas into your pipeline
Integrate Atlas with any ORM
Roles, permissions, and policies as code
Lookup tables and reference data
Run via the Atlas Operator
Manage schemas via Terraform
End-to-end control and compliance
Block drift before and after deploys
Safe schema changes at machine speed
Apply modern CI/CD to schema changes
One migration tool to rule them all
Manage thousands of databases as one
liquibase vs atlas
Atlas plans migrations automatically from your schema as code, lints them for unsafe changes, and imports your existing Liquibase changelog directory in one command.
Where Atlas and Liquibase differ
Both tools apply versioned migrations reliably. The rows below cover what surrounds that: planning, validation, rollback, and operations.
Migration planning
Automatic. Atlas diffs the current state against your desired schema and writes the SQL, respecting your policies.
Hand-written changesets. diff-changelog can generate a changelog from two databases as a manual CLI operation.
Source of truth
Schema as code in SQL or HCL. ORM models or a live database can also define the desired state.
Changelog files in XML, YAML, JSON, or formatted SQL. The current schema is the accumulated result of all changesets.
Rollback
atlas migrate down computes the revert plan from the live database, and handles partially applied migrations.
Rollback by tag, date, or count. Auto-generated rollback covers some change types; the rest need custom rollback logic.
Validation and linting
Built-in analyzers flag destructive changes, table locks, and incompatible changes, locally and in CI.
Checksum validation and preconditions. No semantic linting or policy engine.
Testing
Unit-style tests for schemas and data migrations, runnable locally and in CI.
Not available.
CI/CD integrations
Native GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, CircleCI, and Azure DevOps integrations with PR comments and merge gates.
CLI, Maven, Gradle, and Ant plugins, plus an official GitHub Action.
Kubernetes and Terraform
Official Kubernetes Operator (AtlasSchema, AtlasMigration CRDs) and Terraform provider.
No official operator or provider. Kubernetes runs typically use the CLI in an init container.
Drift detection
Pre-apply drift check inside the pipeline, plus continuous monitoring with alerts.
diff-changelog reports drift on demand. No continuous detection.
Runtime
Single static Go binary and Docker image, around 63 MB. No runtime dependencies.
Java CLI. Requires Java 8 or newer.
Bring your Liquibase history with you
atlas migrate import converts an existing Liquibase directory into Atlas format. Three steps take a project from Liquibase to Atlas without rewriting its history.
Import your migration directory
Formatted SQL changelogs convert to Atlas format with an atlas.sum checksum file. Rollback statements are skipped: Atlas computes down migrations dynamically.
Point Atlas at your database
One env block per real environment. Planning and validation run against an ephemeral dev container, not your targets.
Baseline and take over
The baseline flag marks migrations up to that version as already applied on the existing database. From here, atlas migrate diff plans new changes and atlas migrate apply ships them.
Keep your history. Change your workflow.
atlas migrate import converts an existing Liquibase changelog in one command. Start free, or schedule a demo to plan the rollout with your team.