head to head · open source
grpc-gateway vs cli-printing-press
grpc-gateway has 20,001 GitHub stars, 2,410 forks, 149 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cli-printing-press has 4,724 stars, 515 forks, 65 open issues and last shipped today. grpc-gateway leads on adoption by 323% (20,001 vs 4,724 stars). grpc-gateway is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause; cli-printing-press is written in Go under MIT. grpc-gateway has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, cli-printing-press 11%. cli-printing-press was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (openapi), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| grpc-gateway | cli-printing-press | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 20K | ★ 4.7K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 515 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick grpc-gateway if
- You weight community size — 20K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cli-printing-press if
- You want the cli-printing-press feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cli-printing-press fits your workflow better
About grpc-gateway
gRPC Gateway is a plugin for protoc , the Google protocol buffers compiler. It reads protobuf service definitions and generates a reverse proxy server that translates a RESTful HTTP API into gRPC. The generated server follows the google.api.http annotations attached to those service definitions, so a single set of protobuf services can be exposed in both gRPC and RESTful style at the same time. It lives in the gRPC ecosystem, is written in Go, and is distributed under the BSD 3 Clause license.
read the full grpc-gateway overview →
About cli-printing-press
CLI Printing Press is a Go tool that reads an API's official documentation, studies competing community CLIs and MCP servers, sniffs out undocumented endpoints, and prints a token efficient Go CLI alongside a Claude Code skill and an MCP server — built for AI agents first, and for the developers who wire those agents up.
read the full cli-printing-press 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 grpc-gateway or cli-printing-press more popular?
grpc-gateway has 20,001 GitHub stars and cli-printing-press has 4,724. grpc-gateway has the larger community by that measure.
Are grpc-gateway and cli-printing-press free?
Both are open source. grpc-gateway is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and cli-printing-press under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between grpc-gateway and cli-printing-press?
grpc-gateway is written in Go and cli-printing-press 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, grpc-gateway or cli-printing-press?
Choose grpc-gateway if you want the larger community (20,001 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose cli-printing-press if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.