head to head · open source
Bruno vs Krakend
Bruno has 47,022 GitHub stars, 2,888 forks, 1,831 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Krakend has 2,682 stars, 501 forks, 37 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Bruno leads on adoption by 1,653% (47,022 vs 2,682 stars). Bruno is written in JavaScript under MIT; Krakend is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Bruno has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, Krakend 19%. 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.
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Side by side
| Bruno | Krakend | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 501 |
| 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 Krakend if
- You want the Krakend 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 Krakend 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 Krakend
KrakenD Community Edition is the open source distribution of the KrakenD API Gateway, a high performance, stateless, declarative gateway written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the cloud native developer tooling ecosystem, alongside Kubernetes, Docker, and Go based backend services, and it is catalogued here under Developer Tools / API Development & Testing. The project is extensible and platform agnostic, and it runs both in cloud native environments and on self hosted on premises infrastructure.
read the full Krakend overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Bruno or Krakend more popular?
Bruno has 47,022 GitHub stars and Krakend has 2,682. Bruno has the larger community by that measure.
Are Bruno and Krakend free?
Both are open source. Bruno is licensed under MIT and Krakend under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Bruno and Krakend?
Bruno is written in JavaScript and Krakend 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 Krakend?
Choose Bruno if you want the larger community (47,022 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Krakend if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.