head to head · open source
Appwrite vs Rivet
Appwrite has 57,400 GitHub stars, 5,725 forks, 1,008 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Rivet has 6,144 stars, 249 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Appwrite leads on adoption by 834% (57,400 vs 6,144 stars). Appwrite is written in PHP under BSD-3-Clause; Rivet is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Appwrite has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, Rivet 4%. Rivet was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Appwrite | Rivet | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 57K | ★ 6.1K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | PHP | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.7K | ⑂ 249 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Appwrite if
- You weight community size — 57K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Rivet if
- You want the Rivet feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Rivet fits your workflow better
About Appwrite
Appwrite is an open source backend platform that consolidates infrastructure services—authentication, databases, storage, functions, messaging, hosting, and real time capabilities—into a single, unified system. It runs as a self hosted service or via a managed cloud offering (Appwrite Cloud), targeting developers who want to avoid assembling and maintaining disparate backend tools.
read the full Appwrite overview →
About Rivet
Rivet is an open source runtime for building stateful backends around in memory actors. It is written in Rust and released under the Apache 2.0 license, and it lives in the developer tools ecosystem for build and deployment, with topics that place it alongside Cloudflare Durable Objects, FoundationDB, serverless platforms, and realtime multiplayer infrastructure. An actor in Rivet is a long running, lightweight process that holds its state in memory while persisting that state automatically, so a developer creates one actor per agent, per session, or per user rather than managing a separate service for each.…
read the full Rivet overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Appwrite or Rivet more popular?
Appwrite has 57,400 GitHub stars and Rivet has 6,144. Appwrite has the larger community by that measure.
Are Appwrite and Rivet free?
Both are open source. Appwrite is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and Rivet under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Appwrite and Rivet?
Appwrite is written in PHP and Rivet in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Appwrite or Rivet?
Choose Appwrite if you want the larger community (57,400 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose Rivet if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.