head to head · open source
Bruno vs api-firewall
Bruno has 47,992 GitHub stars, 3,068 forks, 1,831 open issues and last shipped yesterday. api-firewall has 654 stars, 62 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Bruno leads on adoption by 7,238% (47,992 vs 654 stars). Bruno is written in JavaScript under MIT; api-firewall is written in Go under MPL-2.0. Bruno has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, api-firewall 9%. Bruno was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (openapi), 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
| Bruno | api-firewall | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 654 |
| License | MIT | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-04-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 62 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Bruno if
- You weight community size — 48K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick api-firewall if
- You want the api-firewall feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and api-firewall fits your workflow better
About Bruno
Bruno Opensource IDE for exploring and testing APIs. English Українська Русский Türkçe Deutsch Français Português (BR) 한국어 বাংলা Español Italiano Română Polski 简体中文 正體中文 العربية 日本語 ქართული Nederlands فارسی Bruno is a new and innovative API client, aimed at revolutionizing the status quo represented by Postman and similar tools out there. Bruno stores your collections directly in a folder on your filesystem. We use a plain text markup language, Bru, to save information about API requests. You can use Git or any version control of your choice to collaborate over your API collections. Bruno is offline only. There…
read the full Bruno overview →
About api-firewall
Open Source API Firewall by Wallarm API Firewall is a high performance proxy with API request and response validation based on OpenAPI and GraphQL schemas. It is designed to protect REST and GraphQL API endpoints in cloud native environments. API Firewall provides API hardening with the use of a positive security model allowing calls that match a predefined API specification for requests and responses, while rejecting everything else. The key features of API Firewall are: Secure REST and GraphQL API endpoints by blocking malicious requests Stop API data breaches by blocking malformed API responses Discover…
read the full api-firewall overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Bruno or api-firewall more popular?
Bruno has 47,992 GitHub stars and api-firewall has 654. Bruno has the larger community by that measure.
Are Bruno and api-firewall free?
Both are open source. Bruno is licensed under MIT and api-firewall under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Bruno and api-firewall?
Bruno is written in JavaScript and api-firewall 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, Bruno or api-firewall?
Choose Bruno if you want the larger community (47,992 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose api-firewall if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.