head to head · open source
Qdrant vs cayley
Qdrant has 34,650 GitHub stars, 2,682 forks, 704 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cayley has 15,065 stars, 1,238 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. Qdrant leads on adoption by 130% (34,650 vs 15,065 stars). Qdrant is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; cayley is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Qdrant has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, cayley 8%. Qdrant was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Qdrant | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 15K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.7K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Qdrant if
- You weight community size — 35K 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 cayley if
- You want the cayley feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cayley fits your workflow better
About Qdrant
Qdrant is a vector similarity search engine and database built in Rust, designed for production use in AI applications. It stores, manages, and retrieves high dimensional vectors alongside associated metadata (payloads), supporting fast nearest neighbor search with filtering. It solves the problem of efficiently performing semantic or neural based matching at scale—such as finding similar images, recommending content, or powering retrieval augmented generation (RAG)—by replacing slow or inflexible brute force or index based approaches with a purpose built engine optimized for vector operations.…
read the full Qdrant overview →
About cayley
Cayley is an open source graph database written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It stores and queries Linked Data, the graph shaped data model standardized by the W3C for the Semantic Web, and its design takes direct inspiration from the graph database that sat behind Google's Knowledge Graph, formerly known as Freebase. The project lives in the Go ecosystem and has been maintained in public for roughly twelve years, accumulating about 15,000 stars and 1,238 forks, with 93 open issues at the time of writing. Its topics — cayley, go, graph, graph database, linked data — describe both the language …
read the full cayley overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Qdrant or cayley more popular?
Qdrant has 34,650 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,065. Qdrant has the larger community by that measure.
Are Qdrant and cayley free?
Both are open source. Qdrant is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cayley under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Qdrant and cayley?
Qdrant is written in Rust and cayley in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Qdrant or cayley?
Choose Qdrant if you want the larger community (34,650 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.