head to head · open source
Turso vs cayley
Turso has 17,215 GitHub stars, 530 forks, 453 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. cayley has 15,064 stars, 1,238 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. Turso leads on adoption by 14% (17,215 vs 15,064 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 | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 530 | ⑂ 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 is an open source, open contribution fork of SQLite created and maintained by Turso. It lives in the SQLite ecosystem and extends the embedded database model with features such as embedded replicas and remote access. The repository also distinguishes libSQL from the separate Turso database, which is a SQLite compatible implementation written from scratch in Rust and currently in beta.
read the full Turso overview →
About cayley
Cayley is an open source graph database written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It stores and queries Linked Data, the graph shaped data model standardized by the W3C for the Semantic Web, and its design takes direct inspiration from the graph database that sat behind Google's Knowledge Graph, formerly known as Freebase. The project lives in the Go ecosystem and has been maintained in public for roughly twelve years, accumulating about 15,000 stars and 1,238 forks, with 93 open issues at the time of writing. Its topics — cayley, go, graph, graph database, linked data — describe both the language …
read the full cayley overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Turso or cayley more popular?
Turso has 17,215 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,064. 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 (17,215 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.