head to head · open source
duckdb vs excelize
duckdb has 42,747 GitHub stars, 4,176 forks, 858 open issues and last shipped yesterday. excelize has 21,036 stars, 1,984 forks, 131 open issues and last shipped yesterday. duckdb leads on adoption by 103% (42,747 vs 21,036 stars). duckdb is written in C++ under MIT; excelize is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. duckdb has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, excelize 9%. 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 | excelize | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 43K | ★ 21K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | C++ | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 2.0K |
| 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 excelize if
- You want the excelize feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and excelize 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 excelize
Excelize Introduction Excelize is a library written in pure Go providing a set of functions that allow you to write to and read from XLAM / XLSM / XLSX / XLTM / XLTX files. Supports reading and writing spreadsheet documents generated by Microsoft Excel™ 2007 and later. Supports complex components by high compatibility, and provided streaming API for generating or reading data from a worksheet with huge amounts of data. This library needs Go version 1.25.0 or later. The full docs can be seen using go's built in documentation tool, or online at go.dev and docs reference. Basic Usage Installation If your…
read the full excelize overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is duckdb or excelize more popular?
duckdb has 42,747 GitHub stars and excelize has 21,036. duckdb has the larger community by that measure.
Are duckdb and excelize free?
Both are open source. duckdb is licensed under MIT and excelize under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between duckdb and excelize?
duckdb is written in C++ and excelize 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, duckdb or excelize?
Choose duckdb if you want the larger community (42,747 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose excelize if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.