head to head · open source
orm vs citus
orm has 47,661 GitHub stars, 2,605 forks, 2,627 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. citus has 12,840 stars, 805 forks, 1,075 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. orm leads on adoption by 271% (47,661 vs 12,840 stars). orm is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; citus is written in C under AGPL-3.0. orm has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, citus 6%. orm was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (database, postgres), 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
| orm | citus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 805 |
| 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 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 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 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 orm or citus more popular?
orm has 47,661 GitHub stars and citus has 12,840. orm has the larger community by that measure.
Are orm and citus free?
Both are open source. orm is licensed under Apache-2.0 and citus under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between orm and citus?
orm 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, orm or citus?
Choose orm if you want the larger community (47,661 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose citus if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.