head to head · open source
orm vs cayley
orm has 47,664 GitHub stars, 2,634 forks, 2,627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cayley has 15,067 stars, 1,234 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. orm leads on adoption by 216% (47,664 vs 15,067 stars). orm is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; cayley is written in Go under Apache-2.0. orm has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, cayley 8%. orm 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| orm | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 15K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick orm if
- You weight community size — 48K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- 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 orm
Docs Discord X Blog Post Architecture Using Prisma 7? It remains fully supported. Its source lives on the v7 branch of this repository and its docs at prisma.io/docs/orm/v7. Prisma 8 is a release candidate. 8.0.0 final is expected in the next four to eight weeks. Until then a release candidate may include breaking changes, and every release ships with an upgrade recipe that the prisma 8 skill applies for you. The candidate is a complete implementation we stand behind: we treat bugs in it as urgent, and the risk you take on is a feature that is not built yet rather than churn. The feature scoreboard names every…
About cayley
Cayley is an open source database for Linked Data. It is inspired by the graph database behind Google's Knowledge Graph (formerly Freebase)). Documentation Features Built in query editor, visualizer and REPL Multiple query languages: Gizmo: query language inspired by Gremlin GraphQL inspired query language MQL: simplified version for Freebase) fans Modular: easy to connect to your favorite programming languages and back end stores Production ready: well tested and used by various companies for their production workloads Fast: optimized specifically for usage in applications Performance Rough performance testing…
read the full cayley overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Databases projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Databases field.
Frequently asked questions
Is orm or cayley more popular?
orm has 47,664 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,067. orm has the larger community by that measure.
Are orm and cayley free?
Both are open source. orm is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cayley under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between orm and cayley?
orm is written in TypeScript 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, orm or cayley?
Choose orm if you want the larger community (47,664 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.