head to head · open source
Bruno vs curlie
Bruno has 47,992 GitHub stars, 3,068 forks, 1,831 open issues and last shipped yesterday. curlie has 3,730 stars, 120 forks, 26 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. Bruno leads on adoption by 1,187% (47,992 vs 3,730 stars). Bruno is written in JavaScript under MIT; curlie is written in Go under MIT. Bruno has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, curlie 3%. Bruno was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (api-client, developer-tools, http-client), 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 | curlie | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 3.7K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-12-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 120 |
| 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 curlie if
- You want the curlie feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and curlie 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 curlie
Curlie If you like the interface of HTTPie but miss the features of curl, curlie is what you are searching for. Curlie is a frontend to curl that adds the ease of use of httpie , without compromising on features and performance. All curl options are exposed with syntax sugar and output formatting inspired from httpie . Install Using homebrew: Using webi: Using eget: Using macports: Using pkg: Using go: Using scoop: Using mise: Or download a binary package. Usage Synopsis: Simple GET: Custom method, headers and JSON data: When running interactively, curlie provides pretty printed output for json. To force pretty…
read the full curlie overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Bruno or curlie more popular?
Bruno has 47,992 GitHub stars and curlie has 3,730. Bruno has the larger community by that measure.
Are Bruno and curlie free?
Both are open source. Bruno is licensed under MIT and curlie under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Bruno and curlie?
Bruno is written in JavaScript and curlie 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 curlie?
Choose Bruno if you want the larger community (47,992 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose curlie if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.