head to head · open source
casbin vs gokey
casbin has 20,477 GitHub stars, 1,767 forks, 38 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. gokey has 2,440 stars, 110 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. casbin leads on adoption by 739% (20,477 vs 2,440 stars). casbin is written in Go under Apache-2.0; gokey is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. casbin has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, gokey 5%. casbin 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
| casbin | gokey | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 20K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-07-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.8K | ⑂ 110 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick casbin if
- You weight community size — 20K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick gokey if
- You want the gokey feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and gokey fits your workflow better
About casbin
Apache Casbin ==== News : still worry about how to write the correct Apache Casbin policy? Apache Casbin online editor is coming to help! Try it at: Apache Casbin is a powerful and efficient open source access control library for Golang projects. It provides support for enforcing authorization based on various access control models. All the languages supported by Apache Casbin: Table of contents Supported models How it works? Features Installation Documentation Online editor Tutorials Get started Policy management Policy persistence Policy consistence between multiple nodes Role manager Benchmarks Examples…
read the full casbin overview →
About gokey
gokey A simple vaultless password manager in Go gokey is a password manager, which does not require a password vault. Instead of storing your passwords in a vault it derives your password on the fly from your master password and supplied realm string (for example, resource URL). This way you do not have to manage, backup or sync your password vault (or trust its management to a third party) as your passwords are available immediately anywhere. example options o by default gokey outputs generated data to stdout P path to master password file which will be used to generate other passwords/keys or to encrypt seed…
read the full gokey overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is casbin or gokey more popular?
casbin has 20,477 GitHub stars and gokey has 2,440. casbin has the larger community by that measure.
Are casbin and gokey free?
Both are open source. casbin is licensed under Apache-2.0 and gokey under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between casbin and gokey?
casbin is written in Go and gokey 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, casbin or gokey?
Choose casbin if you want the larger community (20,477 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose gokey if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.