head to head · open source
orm vs toydb
orm has 47,660 GitHub stars, 2,602 forks, 2,627 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. toydb has 7,301 stars, 625 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. orm leads on adoption by 553% (47,660 vs 7,301 stars). orm is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; toydb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. orm has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, toydb 9%. 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 | toydb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 7.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-10-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 625 |
| 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 toydb if
- You want the toydb 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 toydb 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 toydb
toyDB Distributed SQL database in Rust, built from scratch as an educational project. Main features: [Raft distributed consensus][raft] for linearizable state machine replication. [ACID transactions][txn] with MVCC based snapshot isolation. [Pluggable storage engine][storage] with [BitCask][bitcask] and [in memory][memory] backends. [Iterator based query engine][query] with [heuristic optimization][optimizer] and time travel support. [SQL interface][sql] including joins, aggregates, and transactions. toyDB is intended to be simple and understandable, and also functional and correct. Other aspects like…
read the full toydb overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is orm or toydb more popular?
orm has 47,660 GitHub stars and toydb has 7,301. orm has the larger community by that measure.
Are orm and toydb free?
Both are open source. orm is licensed under Apache-2.0 and toydb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between orm and toydb?
orm is written in TypeScript and toydb 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 toydb?
Choose orm if you want the larger community (47,660 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose toydb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.