head to head · open source
drawDB vs cayley
drawDB has 40,223 GitHub stars, 3,350 forks, 241 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. cayley has 15,067 stars, 1,234 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. drawDB leads on adoption by 167% (40,223 vs 15,067 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 | 2026-11-01 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.4K | ⑂ 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 Free, simple, and intuitive database schema editor and SQL generator. DrawDB is a robust and user friendly database entity relationship diagram (ERD) editor right in your browser. Build diagrams with a few clicks, export and import SQL scripts, generate migrations, customize your editor, and more without creating an account. See the full set of features on here. Getting Started Local Development Build Docker Build If you want to enable sharing, set up the server and environment variables according to .env.sample . This is optional unless you need to share files. Contributing Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for…
read the full drawDB overview →
About cayley
Cayley is an open source database for Linked Data. It is inspired by the graph database behind Google's Knowledge Graph (formerly Freebase)). Documentation Features Built in query editor, visualizer and REPL Multiple query languages: Gizmo: query language inspired by Gremlin GraphQL inspired query language MQL: simplified version for Freebase) fans Modular: easy to connect to your favorite programming languages and back end stores Production ready: well tested and used by various companies for their production workloads Fast: optimized specifically for usage in applications Performance Rough performance testing…
read the full cayley overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is drawDB or cayley more popular?
drawDB has 40,223 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,067. 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 (40,223 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.