head to head · open source
casbin vs passforios
casbin has 20,399 GitHub stars, 1,757 forks, 38 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. passforios has 1,645 stars, 114 forks, 176 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. casbin leads on adoption by 1,140% (20,399 vs 1,645 stars). casbin is written in Go under Apache-2.0; passforios is written in Swift under MIT. casbin has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, passforios 7%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| casbin | passforios | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 20K | ★ 1.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Swift |
| Last push | 2026-09-11 | 2026-08-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.8K | ⑂ 114 |
| 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 passforios if
- You want the passforios feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Swift
- You evaluated both and passforios fits your workflow better
About casbin
Apache Casbin is an Apache licensed authorization library for Go that helps developers enforce access control models such as ACL, RBAC, and ABAC inside their own applications rather than in a separate service.
read the full casbin overview →
About passforios
Pass for iOS is an open source iOS client for ZX2C4's Pass command line password manager, built for people who already keep credentials in a GPG encrypted, Git versioned password store and want to view, copy, or edit them from an iPhone or iPad.
read the full passforios overview →
More in Security & Privacy
Related comparisons
More Identity & Access Management (IAM) projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Identity & Access Management (IAM) field.
Frequently asked questions
Is casbin or passforios more popular?
casbin has 20,399 GitHub stars and passforios has 1,645. casbin has the larger community by that measure.
Are casbin and passforios free?
Both are open source. casbin is licensed under Apache-2.0 and passforios under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between casbin and passforios?
casbin is written in Go and passforios in Swift. 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 passforios?
Choose casbin if you want the larger community (20,399 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose passforios if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.