turso

Turso is a from-scratch rewrite of SQLite in Rust, fully compatible at the SQL and file-format level but built on a modern architecture with memory safety and concurrent writes. This is the project that used to be called Limbo. It is now the company's main direction, MIT-licensed, and you can embed it directly in your app the way you would regular SQLite.

Worth being clear about the moving parts, because the naming confuses everyone. Turso Database (this repo) is the new Rust engine, currently in beta. libSQL is the company's older C fork of SQLite, production-ready today, and the thing that still powers Turso Cloud. If you are starting a new project the company points you at Turso Database, but it is beta software, so test it before you trust it with anything important.

The engine is free and open source, self-host it for $0. Turso Cloud is the managed edge platform: a free tier covers side projects, paid plans add edge replication and higher limits for apps that need data close to users. Solo devs and small teams: the free tier or self-hosting covers most workloads. Larger orgs with complex queries probably still want Postgres.

The catch: this is SQLite, not Postgres. Simpler type system, fewer concurrency guarantees historically, no stored procedures. And the new engine is beta, so you are choosing between the stable-but-older libSQL and the modern-but-unproven Turso Database. Read-heavy edge apps, mobile backends, and per-user databases are where it shines.