head to head · open source
Turso vs cayley
Turso has 17,309 GitHub stars, 554 forks, 453 open issues and last shipped 17 days ago. cayley has 15,067 stars, 1,234 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Turso leads on adoption by 15% (17,309 vs 15,067 stars). Turso is written in C under MIT; cayley is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Turso has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, cayley 8%. Turso 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
| Turso | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 15K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-17 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 554 | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Turso if
- You weight community size — 17K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C
- 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 Turso
libSQL libSQL is an open source, open contribution fork of SQLite, created and maintained by Turso . libSQL Docs · libSQL Manifesto · Turso · Turso Docs · Discord · Blog & Tutorials [!IMPORTANT] Turso database and libSQL are two different projects from the same team. libSQL (this repository) is an open source fork of SQLite. It extends SQLite with features like embedded replicas and remote access, but inherits SQLite's fundamental limitations such as the single writer model. Turso database is a SQLite compatible database rewritten from scratch in Rust. It is not a fork of SQLite — it is a completely new…
read the full Turso 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 Turso or cayley more popular?
Turso has 17,309 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,067. Turso has the larger community by that measure.
Are Turso and cayley free?
Both are open source. Turso is licensed under MIT and cayley under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Turso and cayley?
Turso is written in C 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, Turso or cayley?
Choose Turso if you want the larger community (17,309 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.