head to head · open source
Ollama vs paradedb
Ollama has 181,161 GitHub stars, 17,917 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped yesterday. paradedb has 9,276 stars, 457 forks, 193 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Ollama leads on adoption by 1,853% (181,161 vs 9,276 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; paradedb is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. Ollama has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, paradedb 5%. paradedb 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
| Ollama | paradedb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 181K | ★ 9.3K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 457 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ollama if
- You weight community size — 181K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick paradedb if
- You want the paradedb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and paradedb fits your workflow better
About Ollama
Ollama is a Go based, MIT licensed runtime that downloads and runs open source large language models such as DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, GLM, MiniMax and gpt oss locally on a user's own machine, and it is aimed at developers and teams that want model inference without routing prompts through a hosted API.
read the full Ollama overview →
About paradedb
ParadeDB is an AGPL 3.0 PostgreSQL extension, written in Rust and distributed from the paradedb repository, that upgrades Postgres with full text search, BM25 scoring, vector retrieval, and aggregations so application data and the search engine live in one database — intended for teams that would otherwise deploy and sync a separate search system.
read the full paradedb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ollama or paradedb more popular?
Ollama has 181,161 GitHub stars and paradedb has 9,276. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and paradedb free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and paradedb under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and paradedb?
Ollama is written in Go and paradedb in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Ollama or paradedb?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (181,161 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose paradedb if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.