head to head · open source
ioredis vs cayley
ioredis has 15,339 GitHub stars, 1,251 forks, 202 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. cayley has 15,064 stars, 1,238 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. ioredis leads on adoption by 2% (15,339 vs 15,064 stars). ioredis is written in TypeScript under MIT; cayley is written in Go under Apache-2.0. ioredis has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, cayley 8%. ioredis 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
| ioredis | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 15K | ★ 15K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick ioredis if
- You weight community size — 15K 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 ioredis
ioredis is a robust, performance focused and full featured Redis client for Node.js, written entirely in TypeScript and released under the MIT licence, intended for Node.js developers and platform teams that need their applications to talk to Redis reliably.
read the full ioredis 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 ioredis or cayley more popular?
ioredis has 15,339 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,064. ioredis has the larger community by that measure.
Are ioredis and cayley free?
Both are open source. ioredis is licensed under MIT and cayley under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ioredis and cayley?
ioredis 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, ioredis or cayley?
Choose ioredis if you want the larger community (15,339 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.