head to head · open source
starrocks vs roapi
starrocks has 12,229 GitHub stars, 2,650 forks, 1,443 open issues and last shipped today. roapi has 3,435 stars, 211 forks, 66 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. starrocks leads on adoption by 256% (12,229 vs 3,435 stars). starrocks is written in Java under Apache-2.0; roapi is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. starrocks has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, roapi 6%. starrocks was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (analytics, delta-lake), 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
| starrocks | roapi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 12K | ★ 3.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-03-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 211 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick starrocks if
- You weight community size — 12K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- 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 starrocks
Download Docs Benchmarks Demo StarRocks is the world's fastest open query engine for sub second, ad hoc analytics both on and off the data lakehouse. With average query performance 3x faster than other popular alternatives, StarRocks is a query engine that eliminates the need for denormalization and adapts to your use cases, without having to move your data or rewrite SQL. A Linux Foundation project. Learn more 👉🏻 What Is StarRocks: Features and Use Cases, Join StarRocks Summit 2025! Features 🚀 Native vectorized SQL engine: StarRocks adopts vectorization technology to make full use of the parallel computing…
read the full starrocks overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is starrocks or roapi more popular?
starrocks has 12,229 GitHub stars and roapi has 3,435. starrocks has the larger community by that measure.
Are starrocks and roapi free?
Both are open source. starrocks is licensed under Apache-2.0 and roapi under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between starrocks and roapi?
starrocks is written in Java 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, starrocks or roapi?
Choose starrocks if you want the larger community (12,229 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.