head to head · open source
NocoDB vs citus
NocoDB has 65,408 GitHub stars, 5,131 forks, 710 open issues and last shipped yesterday. citus has 12,840 stars, 805 forks, 1,075 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. NocoDB leads on adoption by 409% (65,408 vs 12,840 stars). NocoDB is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; citus is written in C under AGPL-3.0. NocoDB has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, citus 6%. NocoDB was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (postgresql), 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
| NocoDB | citus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 13K |
| License | Custom / other | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.1K | ⑂ 805 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick NocoDB if
- You weight community size — 65K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick citus if
- You want the citus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and citus fits your workflow better
About NocoDB
NocoDB is the fastest and easiest way to build databases online. Website • Discord • Community • Twitter • Reddit • Documentation See other languages » Join Our Community Installation Docker with SQLite Docker with PG Auto upstall Auto upstall is a single command that sets up NocoDB on a server for production usage. Behind the scenes it auto generates docker compose for you. bash bash install.nocodb.com/noco.sh script can be found here in our github Other Methods Binaries are only for quick testing locally. When running locally access nocodb by visiting: For more installation methods, please refer to our docs…
read the full NocoDB overview →
About citus
What is Citus? Citus is a PostgreSQL extension that transforms Postgres into a distributed database—so you can achieve high performance at any scale. With Citus, you extend your PostgreSQL database with new superpowers: Distributed tables are sharded across a cluster of PostgreSQL nodes to combine their CPU, memory, storage and I/O capacity. Reference tables are replicated to all nodes for joins and foreign keys from distributed tables and to maximize read performance. Distributed query engine routes and parallelizes SELECT, DML, and other operations on distributed tables across the cluster. Columnar storage…
read the full citus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NocoDB or citus more popular?
NocoDB has 65,408 GitHub stars and citus has 12,840. NocoDB has the larger community by that measure.
Are NocoDB and citus free?
Both are open source. NocoDB has no licence declared in this registry, and citus is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between NocoDB and citus?
NocoDB is written in TypeScript and citus in C. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, NocoDB or citus?
Choose NocoDB if you want the larger community (65,408 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose citus if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.