head to head · open source
mall vs dbal
mall has 84,792 GitHub stars, 29,827 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. dbal has 9,707 stars, 1,377 forks, 304 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. mall leads on adoption by 774% (84,792 vs 9,707 stars). mall is written in Java under Apache-2.0; dbal is written in PHP under MIT. mall has attracted 35% as many forks as stars, dbal 14%. mall was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (mysql), 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
| mall | dbal | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 85K | ★ 9.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Java | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-15 | 2026-09-12 |
| Forks | ⑂ 30K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 dbal if
- You want the dbal feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and dbal 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 dbal
Doctrine DBAL is an MIT licensed PHP database abstraction layer, maintained as part of the Doctrine project, that provides one API for database schema introspection and schema management across IBM Db2, MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and SQLite — and it is aimed at PHP developers and teams that must write database code portable across those engines instead of hand writing driver specific SQL for each one.
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Frequently asked questions
Is mall or dbal more popular?
mall has 84,792 GitHub stars and dbal has 9,707. mall has the larger community by that measure.
Are mall and dbal free?
Both are open source. mall is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dbal under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between mall and dbal?
mall is written in Java and dbal in PHP. 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 dbal?
Choose mall if you want the larger community (84,792 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dbal if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.