head to head · open source
Qdrant vs cayley
Qdrant has 35,390 GitHub stars, 2,793 forks, 704 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cayley has 15,067 stars, 1,234 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Qdrant leads on adoption by 135% (35,390 vs 15,067 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 | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.8K | ⑂ 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
Vector Search Engine for the next generation of AI applications Qdrant (read: quadrant ) is a vector similarity search engine and vector database. It provides a production ready service with a convenient API to store, search, and manage points—vectors with an additional payload. Qdrant is tailored for extended filtering support, making it useful for all sorts of neural network or semantic based matching, faceted search, and other applications. Qdrant is written in Rust 🦀, which makes it fast and reliable even under high load. See benchmarks. With Qdrant, embeddings or neural network encoders can be turned into…
read the full Qdrant overview →
About cayley
Cayley is an open source database for Linked Data. It is inspired by the graph database behind Google's Knowledge Graph (formerly Freebase)). Documentation Features Built in query editor, visualizer and REPL Multiple query languages: Gizmo: query language inspired by Gremlin GraphQL inspired query language MQL: simplified version for Freebase) fans Modular: easy to connect to your favorite programming languages and back end stores Production ready: well tested and used by various companies for their production workloads Fast: optimized specifically for usage in applications Performance Rough performance testing…
read the full cayley overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Qdrant or cayley more popular?
Qdrant has 35,390 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,067. 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 (35,390 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.