head to head · open source
Weaviate vs cayley
Weaviate has 16,934 GitHub stars, 1,433 forks, 738 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cayley has 15,067 stars, 1,234 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Weaviate leads on adoption by 12% (16,934 vs 15,067 stars). Weaviate is written in Go under a custom or non-standard licence; cayley is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Weaviate has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, cayley 8%. Weaviate 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
| Weaviate | cayley | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 15K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Weaviate if
- You weight community size — 17K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 Weaviate
Weaviate Weaviate is an open source, cloud native vector database that stores both objects and vectors, enabling semantic search at scale. It combines vector similarity search with keyword filtering, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and reranking in a single query interface. Common use cases include RAG systems, semantic and image search, recommendation engines, chatbots, and content classification. Weaviate supports two approaches to store vectors: automatic vectorization at import using integrated models (OpenAI, Cohere, HuggingFace, and others) or direct import of pre computed vector embeddings…
read the full Weaviate 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 Weaviate or cayley more popular?
Weaviate has 16,934 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,067. Weaviate has the larger community by that measure.
Are Weaviate and cayley free?
Both are open source. Weaviate has no licence declared in this registry, and cayley is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Weaviate and cayley?
Weaviate is written in Go 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, Weaviate or cayley?
Choose Weaviate if you want the larger community (16,934 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose cayley if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.