head to head · open source
turborepo vs xmake
turborepo has 31,102 GitHub stars, 2,444 forks, 13 open issues and last shipped yesterday. xmake has 12,220 stars, 954 forks, 255 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. turborepo leads on adoption by 155% (31,102 vs 12,220 stars). turborepo is written in Rust under MIT; xmake is written in Lua under Apache-2.0. turborepo has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, xmake 8%. turborepo was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (build-tool), 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
| turborepo | xmake | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Lua |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 954 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick turborepo if
- You weight community size — 31K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick xmake if
- You want the xmake feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Lua
- You evaluated both and xmake fits your workflow better
About turborepo
Turborepo is a build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos, written in Rust and released under the MIT licence, intended for teams that build many packages inside one repository and for the coding agents those teams run against it.
read the full turborepo overview →
About xmake
Xmake is a cross platform build utility and package manager, written in Lua and licensed under Apache 2.0, that takes a single xmake.lua project file and turns it into builds for desktop, mobile, BSD, Wasm and other targets — it is aimed at C, C++, Objective C and mixed toolchain developers who want Make/Ninja style building, CMake/Meson style project generation, and Vcpkg/Conan style dependency handling from one tool.
read the full xmake overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is turborepo or xmake more popular?
turborepo has 31,102 GitHub stars and xmake has 12,220. turborepo has the larger community by that measure.
Are turborepo and xmake free?
Both are open source. turborepo is licensed under MIT and xmake under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between turborepo and xmake?
turborepo is written in Rust and xmake in Lua. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, turborepo or xmake?
Choose turborepo if you want the larger community (31,102 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose xmake if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.