head to head · open source
lancedb vs arcadedb
lancedb has 11,473 GitHub stars, 1,060 forks, 627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. arcadedb has 1,157 stars, 145 forks, 167 open issues and last shipped today. lancedb leads on adoption by 892% (11,473 vs 1,157 stars). lancedb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; arcadedb is written in Java under Apache-2.0. lancedb has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, arcadedb 13%. arcadedb 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
| lancedb | arcadedb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 145 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick lancedb if
- You weight community size — 11K 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 arcadedb if
- You want the arcadedb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and arcadedb fits your workflow better
About lancedb
LanceDB is an open source, developer friendly embedded retrieval library for multimodal AI, maintained in Rust and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It describes itself as a multimodal AI lakehouse: a single place where developers can build, train and analyze AI workloads over vectors, metadata and multimodal data such as text, images, videos and point clouds. It is built on top of the Lance columnar format, which provides the storage layer for efficient storage and analytics.
read the full lancedb overview →
About arcadedb
ArcadeDB is an open source, Apache 2.0 multi model DBMS written in Java for teams that want graph, document, key/value, search, time series, vector embedding and geospatial workloads served from one engine instead of a stack of separate databases.
read the full arcadedb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lancedb or arcadedb more popular?
lancedb has 11,473 GitHub stars and arcadedb has 1,157. lancedb has the larger community by that measure.
Are lancedb and arcadedb free?
Both are open source. lancedb is licensed under Apache-2.0 and arcadedb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lancedb and arcadedb?
lancedb is written in Rust and arcadedb in Java. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, lancedb or arcadedb?
Choose lancedb if you want the larger community (11,473 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose arcadedb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.