head to head · open source
Bruno vs hurl
Bruno has 47,982 GitHub stars, 3,066 forks, 1,831 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. hurl has 19,293 stars, 752 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Bruno leads on adoption by 149% (47,982 vs 19,293 stars). Bruno is written in JavaScript under MIT; hurl is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Bruno has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, hurl 4%. hurl was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (api-testing, 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 | hurl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 19K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-01 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 752 |
| 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 hurl if
- You want the hurl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and hurl 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 hurl
What's Hurl? Hurl is a command line tool that runs HTTP requests defined in a simple plain text format . It can chain requests, capture values and evaluate queries on headers and body response. Hurl is very versatile: it can be used for both fetching data and testing HTTP sessions. Hurl makes it easy to work with HTML content, REST / SOAP / GraphQL APIs, or any other XML / JSON based APIs. Chaining multiple requests is easy: Also an HTTP Test Tool Hurl can run HTTP requests but can also be used to test HTTP responses . Different types of queries and predicates are supported, from [XPath] and [JSONPath] on body…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Bruno or hurl more popular?
Bruno has 47,982 GitHub stars and hurl has 19,293. Bruno has the larger community by that measure.
Are Bruno and hurl free?
Both are open source. Bruno is licensed under MIT and hurl under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Bruno and hurl?
Bruno is written in JavaScript and hurl in Rust. 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 hurl?
Choose Bruno if you want the larger community (47,982 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose hurl if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.