sea-orm vs diesel

Short answerBy steady daily use, diesel runs at 107,307 downloads on a quiet day against 59,264 for sea-orm (1.8x), and 667 crates depend on diesel against 535. Pick sea-orm if you want an async ORM with dynamic queries. Pick diesel if you want compile-time checked queries and sync is acceptable.

Bottom line: Async-first: sea-orm. Maximum compile-time safety: diesel.

59.3Ksea-orm quiet-day downloads/day

107Kdiesel quiet-day downloads/day

535crates depend on sea-orm

667crates depend on diesel

Side by side

	sea-orm	diesel
Quiet-day baseline (downloads/day)	59,264	107,307
Downloads in the window	5,397,939	10,314,510
Share within 2 days of a release	7%	7%
Baseline trend (first 30 vs last 30 days)	+31%	+71%
Reverse dependencies	535	667
All-time downloads	27.7M	41.9M
Releases in the window	4	3
Latest version	2.0.4	2.3.14
Latest release	Sep 27, 2026	Oct 7, 2026
MSRV (latest)	1.94.0	1.86.0
License	MIT OR Apache-2.0	MIT OR Apache-2.0
First published	Aug 7, 2021	Nov 29, 2015

sea-orm: daily downloads

diesel: daily downloads

release windowquiet dayquiet-day median

Which to pick

sea-orm if you want an async ORM with dynamic queries.
diesel if you want compile-time checked queries and sync is acceptable.

Downloads are not quality. The quiet-day baseline is our steadiest public number for real use (release-day spikes from mirrors and CI removed), and reverse dependencies count maintainers who chose the crate. How we compute it.

Each crate in detail

sea-orm: 🐚 An async & dynamic ORM for Rust
diesel: A safe, extensible ORM and Query Builder for PostgreSQL, SQLite, and MySQL

Other comparisons

Sources

crates.io: sea-orm: crates.io/crates/sea-orm (fetched Oct 24, 2026)
crates.io: diesel: crates.io/crates/diesel (fetched Oct 24, 2026)
Demand check: Google autocomplete suggests: www.google.com/search?q=sea+orm+vs+diesel “sea orm vs diesel”, Oct 24, 2026