head to head · open source
Appwrite vs tsuru
Appwrite has 57,400 GitHub stars, 5,725 forks, 1,008 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tsuru has 5,310 stars, 551 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Appwrite leads on adoption by 981% (57,400 vs 5,310 stars). Appwrite is written in PHP under BSD-3-Clause; tsuru is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. Appwrite has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, tsuru 10%. Appwrite was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (docker), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Appwrite | tsuru | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 57K | ★ 5.3K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | PHP | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.7K | ⑂ 551 |
| 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 tsuru if
- You want the tsuru feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tsuru 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 tsuru
tsuru is an open source, extensible Platform as a Service written in Go and released under the BSD 3 Clause license. It lives in the cloud native and DevOps ecosystem alongside Docker, Kubernetes, and the wider container tooling world, and it has been developed in public for roughly fifteen years. Rather than asking developers to think about servers, tsuru presents a platform on which applications are deployed as units and managed through a single command line client. The project describes itself as extensible, which reflects a design where the set of supported runtimes and backing services can be grown rather th…
read the full tsuru overview →
More in Developer Tools
Related comparisons
More Build & Deployment projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Build & Deployment field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Appwrite or tsuru more popular?
Appwrite has 57,400 GitHub stars and tsuru has 5,310. Appwrite has the larger community by that measure.
Are Appwrite and tsuru free?
Both are open source. Appwrite is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and tsuru under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Appwrite and tsuru?
Appwrite is written in PHP and tsuru in Go. 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 tsuru?
Choose Appwrite if you want the larger community (57,400 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose tsuru if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.