head to head · open source
roapi vs duckdb-wasm
roapi has 3,435 GitHub stars, 211 forks, 66 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. duckdb-wasm has 2,162 stars, 240 forks, 189 open issues and last shipped yesterday. roapi leads on adoption by 59% (3,435 vs 2,162 stars). roapi is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; duckdb-wasm is written in TypeScript under MIT. roapi has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, duckdb-wasm 11%. duckdb-wasm 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
| roapi | duckdb-wasm | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 3.4K | ★ 2.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-03-25 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 211 | ⑂ 240 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick roapi if
- You weight community size — 3.4K 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 duckdb-wasm if
- You want the duckdb-wasm feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and duckdb-wasm fits your workflow better
About roapi
ROAPI ROAPI automatically spins up read only APIs for static datasets without requiring you to write a single line of code. It builds on top of Apache Arrow and Datafusion. The core of its design can be boiled down to the following: Query frontends to translate SQL, FlightSQL, GraphQL and REST API queries into Datafusion plans. Datafusion for query plan execution. Data layer to load datasets from a variety of sources and formats with automatic schema inference. Response encoding layer to serialize intermediate Arrow record batch into various formats requested by client. See below for a high level diagram…
read the full roapi overview →
About duckdb-wasm
DuckDB Wasm DuckDB is an in process SQL OLAP Database Management System. DuckDB Wasm brings DuckDB to every browser thanks to WebAssembly. Duckdb Wasm speaks Arrow fluently, reads Parquet, CSV and JSON files backed by Filesystem APIs or HTTP requests and has been tested with Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Node.js. Learn more about DuckDB Wasm from our VLDB publication or the recorded talk. Try it out at shell.duckdb.org or at duckdb.org/visualizer. External third party embedding of DuckDB Wasm, read the API documentation, check out the web app examples, and chat with us on Discord. DuckDB and DuckDB Wasm DuckDB…
read the full duckdb-wasm overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is roapi or duckdb-wasm more popular?
roapi has 3,435 GitHub stars and duckdb-wasm has 2,162. roapi has the larger community by that measure.
Are roapi and duckdb-wasm free?
Both are open source. roapi is licensed under Apache-2.0 and duckdb-wasm under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between roapi and duckdb-wasm?
roapi is written in Rust and duckdb-wasm in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, roapi or duckdb-wasm?
Choose roapi if you want the larger community (3,435 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose duckdb-wasm if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.