head to head · open source
Weaviate vs cayley
Weaviate has 16,818 GitHub stars, 1,403 forks, 738 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cayley has 15,064 stars, 1,238 forks, 93 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. Weaviate leads on adoption by 12% (16,818 vs 15,064 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 | 2026-09-17 | 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 open source vector database. Stores objects and vectors together. Lives in cloud native database and AI search ecosystem. Enables semantic search at scale. Combines vector similarity search with keyword filtering, retrieval augmented generation, and reranking in single query interface.
read the full Weaviate 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 Weaviate or cayley more popular?
Weaviate has 16,818 GitHub stars and cayley has 15,064. 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 (16,818 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.