head to head · open source
reconftw vs cve
reconftw has 8,138 GitHub stars, 1,236 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. cve has 8,087 stars, 977 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. reconftw leads on adoption by 1% (8,138 vs 8,087 stars). reconftw is written in Shell under MIT; cve is written in HTML under MIT. reconftw has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, cve 12%. cve was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (hacking, penetration-testing, pentesting), 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
| reconftw | cve | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.1K | ★ 8.1K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Shell | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-09-22 | 2026-09-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 977 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick reconftw if
- You weight community size — 8.1K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Shell
- 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 reconftw
reconFTW is an automated reconnaissance framework, written in Shell under the MIT licence, that runs a curated chain of security tools against a target domain to enumerate subdomains and hosts, gather OSINT, analyse web surfaces, and check for vulnerabilities; it is built for security researchers, penetration testers, and bug bounty hunters.
read the full reconftw 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 reconftw or cve more popular?
reconftw has 8,138 GitHub stars and cve has 8,087. reconftw has the larger community by that measure.
Are reconftw and cve free?
Both are open source. reconftw is licensed under MIT and cve under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between reconftw and cve?
reconftw is written in Shell 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, reconftw or cve?
Choose reconftw if you want the larger community (8,138 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cve if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.