head to head · open source
typeorm vs cayley
typeorm has 36,652 GitHub stars, 6,670 forks, 646 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. cayley has 15,064 stars, 1,238 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. typeorm leads on adoption by 143% (36,652 vs 15,064 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.
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Side by side
| typeorm | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 37K | ★ 15K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-11 | 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 MIT licensed object relational mapper for TypeScript and JavaScript that runs on Node.js, in the browser, and across mobile and desktop platforms, and it is aimed at developers who want to model, query, and migrate SQL and NoSQL databases from one decorator driven codebase.
read the full typeorm 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 typeorm or cayley more popular?
typeorm has 36,652 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,064. 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 (36,652 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.