head to head · open source
Bruno vs gnostic
Bruno has 47,992 GitHub stars, 3,068 forks, 1,831 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gnostic has 2,311 stars, 280 forks, 119 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Bruno leads on adoption by 1,977% (47,992 vs 2,311 stars). Bruno is written in JavaScript under MIT; gnostic is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Bruno has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, gnostic 12%. Bruno was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (openapi, openapi3), 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 | gnostic | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 2.3K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 280 |
| 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 gnostic if
- You want the gnostic 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 gnostic 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 gnostic
⨁ gnostic This repository contains a Go command line tool which converts JSON and YAML OpenAPI descriptions to and from equivalent Protocol Buffer representations. Protocol Buffers provide a language neutral, platform neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. gnostic 's Protocol Buffer models for the OpenAPI Specification can be used to generate code that includes data structures with explicit fields for the elements of an OpenAPI description. This makes it possible for developers to work with OpenAPI descriptions in type safe ways, which is particularly useful in strongly typed languages…
read the full gnostic overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Bruno or gnostic more popular?
Bruno has 47,992 GitHub stars and gnostic has 2,311. Bruno has the larger community by that measure.
Are Bruno and gnostic free?
Both are open source. Bruno is licensed under MIT and gnostic under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Bruno and gnostic?
Bruno is written in JavaScript and gnostic 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 gnostic?
Choose Bruno if you want the larger community (47,992 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose gnostic if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.