head to head · open source
mall vs cayley
mall has 84,789 GitHub stars, 29,826 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. cayley has 15,064 stars, 1,238 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. mall leads on adoption by 463% (84,789 vs 15,064 stars). mall is written in Java under Apache-2.0; cayley is written in Go under Apache-2.0. mall has attracted 35% as many forks as stars, cayley 8%. mall 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
| mall | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 85K | ★ 15K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-15 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 30K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick mall if
- You weight community size — 85K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- 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 mall
mall is a complete e commerce system built on Spring Boot and MyBatis, distributed as a Java project under the Apache 2.0 license. It ships two applications in one repository: a storefront system for shoppers and an administrative back office for operators. The storefront covers the home portal, product recommendation, product search, product display, shopping cart, order flow, member center, customer service, and help center. The back office covers product management, order management, member management, promotion management, operations management, content management, statistics reports, finance management, perm…
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 mall or cayley more popular?
mall has 84,789 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,064. mall has the larger community by that measure.
Are mall and cayley free?
Both are open source. mall is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cayley under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between mall and cayley?
mall is written in Java 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, mall or cayley?
Choose mall if you want the larger community (84,789 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.