head to head · open source
perspective vs roapi
perspective has 11,232 GitHub stars, 1,338 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. roapi has 3,434 stars, 209 forks, 66 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. perspective leads on adoption by 227% (11,232 vs 3,434 stars). perspective is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; roapi is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. perspective has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, roapi 6%. perspective was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (analytics), 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
| perspective | roapi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 3.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-03-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 209 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick perspective if
- You weight community size — 11K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick roapi if
- You want the roapi 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 roapi fits your workflow better
About perspective
Perspective is an interactive analytics and data visualization component for large, real time and streaming datasets, built for developers and data teams who create user configurable reports, dashboards and notebook applications on top of a high performance streaming query engine.
read the full perspective overview →
About roapi
ROAPI is a Rust based, Apache 2.0 licensed server that turns static and slowly changing datasets into read only SQL, FlightSQL, GraphQL and REST APIs without requiring a single line of application code, and it is built for data engineers, analysts and developers who need to publish Parquet, CSV, JSON or database tables as queryable endpoints quickly.
read the full roapi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is perspective or roapi more popular?
perspective has 11,232 GitHub stars and roapi has 3,434. perspective has the larger community by that measure.
Are perspective and roapi free?
Both are open source. perspective is licensed under Apache-2.0 and roapi under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between perspective and roapi?
perspective is written in Rust and roapi 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, perspective or roapi?
Choose perspective if you want the larger community (11,232 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose roapi if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.