head to head · open source
orm vs sled
orm has 47,661 GitHub stars, 2,605 forks, 2,627 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. sled has 9,103 stars, 429 forks, 172 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. orm leads on adoption by 424% (47,661 vs 9,103 stars). orm is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; sled is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. orm has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, sled 5%. 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 | sled | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 9.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-04-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 429 |
| 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 sled if
- You want the sled feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and sled 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 sled
key value documentation chat about databases with us sled it's all downhill from here!!! An embedded database. $${\color{red}This \space README \space is \space out \space of \space sync \space with \space the \space main \space branch \space which \space contains \space a \space large \space in progress \space rewrite }$$ If you would like to work with structured data without paying expensive deserialization costs, check out the structured example! features API similar to a threadsafe BTreeMap serializable (ACID) transactions for atomically reading and writing to multiple keys in multiple keyspaces. fully…
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Frequently asked questions
Is orm or sled more popular?
orm has 47,661 GitHub stars and sled has 9,103. orm has the larger community by that measure.
Are orm and sled free?
Both are open source. orm is licensed under Apache-2.0 and sled under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between orm and sled?
orm is written in TypeScript and sled 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, orm or sled?
Choose orm if you want the larger community (47,661 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose sled if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.