head to head · open source
orm vs cayley
orm has 47,614 GitHub stars, 2,537 forks, 2,627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cayley has 15,064 stars, 1,238 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. orm leads on adoption by 216% (47,614 vs 15,064 stars). orm is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; cayley is written in Go under Apache-2.0. orm has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, cayley 8%. orm 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
| orm | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 15K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick orm if
- You weight community size — 48K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 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 orm
Prisma ORM is a next generation TypeScript ORM for Node.js and TypeScript applications, supporting PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, SQLite, MongoDB, and CockroachDB, and it is aimed at developers and teams building data backed applications in that ecosystem.
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 orm or cayley more popular?
orm has 47,614 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,064. orm has the larger community by that measure.
Are orm and cayley free?
Both are open source. orm is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cayley under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between orm and cayley?
orm 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, orm or cayley?
Choose orm if you want the larger community (47,614 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.