head to head · open source
typeorm vs cayley
typeorm has 36,665 GitHub stars, 6,694 forks, 646 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. cayley has 15,067 stars, 1,234 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. typeorm leads on adoption by 143% (36,665 vs 15,067 stars). typeorm is written in TypeScript under MIT; cayley is written in Go under Apache-2.0. typeorm has attracted 18% as many forks as stars, cayley 8%. typeorm 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| typeorm | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 37K | ★ 15K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-29 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.7K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick typeorm if
- You weight community size — 37K stars and counting
- You want the MIT 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 typeorm
TypeORM is an ORM that can run in Node.js, Browser, Cordova, Ionic, React Native, NativeScript, Expo, and Electron platforms and can be used with TypeScript and JavaScript (ES2023). Its goal is to always support the latest JavaScript features and provide additional features that help you to develop any kind of application that uses databases from small applications with a few tables to large scale enterprise applications with multiple databases. TypeORM supports more databases than any other JS/TS ORM: Google Spanner, Microsoft SqlServer, MySQL/MariaDB, MongoDB, Oracle, Postgres, SAP HANA and SQLite, as well as…
read the full typeorm 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 →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is typeorm or cayley more popular?
typeorm has 36,665 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,067. typeorm has the larger community by that measure.
Are typeorm and cayley free?
Both are open source. typeorm is licensed under MIT and cayley under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between typeorm and cayley?
typeorm 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, typeorm or cayley?
Choose typeorm if you want the larger community (36,665 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.