head to head · open source
beszel vs witr
beszel has 25,459 GitHub stars, 1,019 forks, 313 open issues and last shipped yesterday. witr has 22,374 stars, 781 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. beszel leads on adoption by 14% (25,459 vs 22,374 stars). beszel is written in Go under MIT; witr is written in Go under Apache-2.0. beszel has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, witr 3%. beszel was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (monitoring), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| beszel | witr | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 22K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 781 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick beszel if
- You weight community size — 25K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick witr if
- You want the witr 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 witr fits your workflow better
About beszel
Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform written in Go and released under the MIT License. It consists of two components: a hub, which is a web application built on PocketBase and provides the dashboard for viewing and managing connected systems, and an agent, which runs on each system being monitored and communicates system metrics back to the hub. The project lives in the self hosted, homelab oriented monitoring ecosystem, alongside the broader category of Infrastructure and Operations tooling, and it is distributed primarily through Docker images published as henrygd/beszel for the hub and henrygd/be…
read the full beszel overview →
About witr
witr is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed Go tool with both a command line interface and an interactive terminal UI that traces any process, port, container, or file back to the exact chain of systems that started it, and it is built for operators, SREs, and developers who need to answer "why is this running?" during debugging and incident response.
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Frequently asked questions
Is beszel or witr more popular?
beszel has 25,459 GitHub stars and witr has 22,374. beszel has the larger community by that measure.
Are beszel and witr free?
Both are open source. beszel is licensed under MIT and witr under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between beszel and witr?
beszel is written in Go and witr 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, beszel or witr?
Choose beszel if you want the larger community (25,459 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose witr if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.