head to head · open source
Bruno vs higress
Bruno has 47,022 GitHub stars, 2,888 forks, 1,831 open issues and last shipped yesterday. higress has 9,397 stars, 1,304 forks, 1,114 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. Bruno leads on adoption by 400% (47,022 vs 9,397 stars). Bruno is written in JavaScript under MIT; higress is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Bruno has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, higress 14%. Bruno was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Bruno | higress | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 9.4K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Bruno if
- You weight community size — 47K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick higress if
- You want the higress 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 higress fits your workflow better
About Bruno
Bruno is a lightweight, open source API client and IDE for exploring and testing APIs, built for developers and teams who want their request collections stored as plain text in a folder on their own filesystem rather than in a vendor's cloud.
read the full Bruno overview →
About higress
Higress is a cloud native, AI native API gateway built on Istio and Envoy that targets platform engineering and AI infrastructure teams who need to route LLM API traffic and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers through a single extensible, self hosted gateway.
read the full higress overview →
More in Developer Tools
Related comparisons
More API Development & Testing projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the API Development & Testing field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Bruno or higress more popular?
Bruno has 47,022 GitHub stars and higress has 9,397. Bruno has the larger community by that measure.
Are Bruno and higress free?
Both are open source. Bruno is licensed under MIT and higress under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Bruno and higress?
Bruno is written in JavaScript and higress 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 higress?
Choose Bruno if you want the larger community (47,022 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose higress if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.