head to head · open source
orm vs q
orm has 47,661 GitHub stars, 2,605 forks, 2,627 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. q has 10,361 stars, 425 forks, 132 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. orm leads on adoption by 360% (47,661 vs 10,361 stars). orm is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; q is written in Python under GPL-3.0. orm has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, q 4%. orm was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (database), 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 | q | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 10K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-02-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 425 |
| 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 q if
- You want the q feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and q 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 q
q Text as Data q's purpose is to bring SQL expressive power to the Linux command line and to provide easy access to text as actual data. q allows the following: Performing SQL like statements directly on tabular text data, auto caching the data in order to accelerate additional querying on the same file. Performing SQL statements directly on multi file sqlite3 databases, without having to merge them or load them into memory The following table shows the impact of using caching: Notice that for the current version, caching is not enabled by default, since the caches take disk space. Use C readwrite or C read to…
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Frequently asked questions
Is orm or q more popular?
orm has 47,661 GitHub stars and q has 10,361. orm has the larger community by that measure.
Are orm and q free?
Both are open source. orm is licensed under Apache-2.0 and q under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between orm and q?
orm is written in TypeScript and q in Python. 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 q?
Choose orm if you want the larger community (47,661 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose q if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.