head to head · open source
NocoDB vs cayley
NocoDB has 64,998 GitHub stars, 5,054 forks, 710 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cayley has 15,064 stars, 1,238 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. NocoDB leads on adoption by 331% (64,998 vs 15,064 stars). NocoDB is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; cayley is written in Go under Apache-2.0. NocoDB has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, cayley 8%. NocoDB 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
| NocoDB | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 15K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.1K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick NocoDB if
- You weight community size — 65K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- 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 NocoDB
NocoDB is a free and self hostable open source Airtable alternative that turns an existing relational database into an intuitive spreadsheet interface, built for teams who want no code data management without moving their data into a hosted SaaS product.
read the full NocoDB 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 NocoDB or cayley more popular?
NocoDB has 64,998 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,064. NocoDB has the larger community by that measure.
Are NocoDB and cayley free?
Both are open source. NocoDB has no licence declared in this registry, and cayley is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between NocoDB and cayley?
NocoDB is written in TypeScript 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, NocoDB or cayley?
Choose NocoDB if you want the larger community (64,998 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.