head to head · open source
duckdb vs roapi
duckdb has 42,747 GitHub stars, 4,176 forks, 858 open issues and last shipped yesterday. roapi has 3,435 stars, 211 forks, 66 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. duckdb leads on adoption by 1,144% (42,747 vs 3,435 stars). duckdb is written in C++ under MIT; roapi is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. duckdb has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, roapi 6%. duckdb was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (analytics), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| duckdb | roapi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 43K | ★ 3.4K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C++ | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-03-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 211 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick duckdb if
- You weight community size — 43K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick roapi if
- You want the roapi feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and roapi fits your workflow better
About duckdb
DuckDB DuckDB is a high performance analytical database system. It is designed to be fast, reliable, portable, and easy to use. DuckDB provides a rich SQL dialect with support far beyond basic SQL. DuckDB supports arbitrary and nested correlated subqueries, window functions, collations, complex types (arrays, structs, maps), and several extensions designed to make SQL easier to use. DuckDB is available as a standalone CLI application and has clients for Python, R, Java, Wasm, etc., with deep integrations with packages such as pandas and dplyr. For more information on using DuckDB, please refer to the DuckDB…
read the full duckdb overview →
About roapi
ROAPI ROAPI automatically spins up read only APIs for static datasets without requiring you to write a single line of code. It builds on top of Apache Arrow and Datafusion. The core of its design can be boiled down to the following: Query frontends to translate SQL, FlightSQL, GraphQL and REST API queries into Datafusion plans. Datafusion for query plan execution. Data layer to load datasets from a variety of sources and formats with automatic schema inference. Response encoding layer to serialize intermediate Arrow record batch into various formats requested by client. See below for a high level diagram…
read the full roapi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is duckdb or roapi more popular?
duckdb has 42,747 GitHub stars and roapi has 3,435. duckdb has the larger community by that measure.
Are duckdb and roapi free?
Both are open source. duckdb is licensed under MIT and roapi under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between duckdb and roapi?
duckdb is written in C++ and roapi in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, duckdb or roapi?
Choose duckdb if you want the larger community (42,747 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose roapi if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.