head to head · open source
Harper vs kysely
Harper has 17,365 GitHub stars, 794 forks, 896 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kysely has 14,327 stars, 456 forks, 173 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Harper leads on adoption by 21% (17,365 vs 14,327 stars). Harper is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; kysely is written in TypeScript under MIT. Harper has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, kysely 3%. Harper was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (nodejs), 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
| Harper | kysely | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 14K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 794 | ⑂ 456 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Harper if
- You weight community size — 17K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick kysely if
- You want the kysely feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and kysely fits your workflow better
About Harper
Harper Harper is an English grammar checker designed to be just right. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition. Grammarly was too expensive and too overbearing. Its suggestions lacked context, and were often just plain wrong . Not to mention: it's a privacy nightmare. Everything you write with Grammarly is sent to their servers. Their privacy policy claims they don't sell the data, but that doesn't mean they don't use it to train large language models and god knows what else. Not only that, but the round trip time of the network request makes revising your work all the more…
read the full Harper overview →
About kysely
Join the discussion ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Get started & more! Kysely Kysely (pronounce “Key Seh Lee”) is a type safe and autocompletion friendly TypeScript SQL query builder. Inspired by Knex.js. Mainly developed for Node.js but also runs on all other JavaScript environments like Deno, Bun, Cloudflare Workers and web browsers. Kysely makes sure you only refer to tables and columns that are visible to the part of the query you're writing. The result type only has the selected columns with correct types and aliases. As an added bonus you get autocompletion for all that stuff. As shown in the gif above, through the pure magic of…
read the full kysely overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Harper or kysely more popular?
Harper has 17,365 GitHub stars and kysely has 14,327. Harper has the larger community by that measure.
Are Harper and kysely free?
Both are open source. Harper is licensed under Apache-2.0 and kysely under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Harper and kysely?
Harper is written in Rust and kysely in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Harper or kysely?
Choose Harper if you want the larger community (17,365 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose kysely if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.