head to head · open source
drawDB vs cayley
drawDB has 39,572 GitHub stars, 3,248 forks, 241 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. cayley has 15,064 stars, 1,238 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. drawDB leads on adoption by 163% (39,572 vs 15,064 stars). drawDB is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; cayley is written in Go under Apache-2.0. drawDB has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, cayley 8%. drawDB 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
| drawDB | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 15K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-13 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick drawDB if
- You weight community size — 40K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cayley if
- You want the cayley feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cayley fits your workflow better
About drawDB
drawDB is a free, open source, browser based database entity relationship diagram (ERD) editor and SQL generator for developers, data modellers, and teams who need to design database schemas and turn them into SQL scripts without creating an account.
read the full drawDB overview →
About cayley
Cayley is an open source graph database written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It stores and queries Linked Data, the graph shaped data model standardized by the W3C for the Semantic Web, and its design takes direct inspiration from the graph database that sat behind Google's Knowledge Graph, formerly known as Freebase. The project lives in the Go ecosystem and has been maintained in public for roughly twelve years, accumulating about 15,000 stars and 1,238 forks, with 93 open issues at the time of writing. Its topics — cayley, go, graph, graph database, linked data — describe both the language …
read the full cayley overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is drawDB or cayley more popular?
drawDB has 39,572 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,064. drawDB has the larger community by that measure.
Are drawDB and cayley free?
Both are open source. drawDB is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and cayley under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between drawDB and cayley?
drawDB is written in JavaScript and cayley 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, drawDB or cayley?
Choose drawDB if you want the larger community (39,572 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.