head to head · open source
ProjectDiscovery vs cve
ProjectDiscovery has 31,471 GitHub stars, 3,888 forks, 107 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. cve has 8,087 stars, 977 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. ProjectDiscovery leads on adoption by 289% (31,471 vs 8,087 stars). ProjectDiscovery is written in Go under MIT; cve is written in HTML under MIT. ProjectDiscovery has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, cve 12%. ProjectDiscovery was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (security), 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
| ProjectDiscovery | cve | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 8.1K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-09-23 | 2026-09-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.9K | ⑂ 977 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick ProjectDiscovery if
- You weight community size — 31K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cve if
- You want the cve feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and cve fits your workflow better
About ProjectDiscovery
Nuclei is a high performance, open source vulnerability scanner built by ProjectDiscovery, part of the ProjectDiscovery ecosystem. It operates as a CLI tool using a simple YAML based DSL to define custom vulnerability checks, enabling precise, real world exploitation simulation to eliminate false positives.
read the full ProjectDiscovery overview →
About cve
cve is an automatically generated, MIT licensed repository from Trickest that gathers almost every publicly available CVE Proof of Concept and publishes it as browsable markdown files, made for penetration testers, red teams and vulnerability researchers who need to find public exploits for a given identifier.
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Frequently asked questions
Is ProjectDiscovery or cve more popular?
ProjectDiscovery has 31,471 GitHub stars and cve has 8,087. ProjectDiscovery has the larger community by that measure.
Are ProjectDiscovery and cve free?
Both are open source. ProjectDiscovery is licensed under MIT and cve under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ProjectDiscovery and cve?
ProjectDiscovery is written in Go and cve in HTML. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, ProjectDiscovery or cve?
Choose ProjectDiscovery if you want the larger community (31,471 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cve if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.