head to head · open source
dua-cli vs gdu
dua-cli has 6,407 GitHub stars, 181 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gdu has 6,173 stars, 251 forks, 54 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. dua-cli leads on adoption by 4% (6,407 vs 6,173 stars). dua-cli is written in Rust under MIT; gdu is written in Go under MIT. dua-cli has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, gdu 4%. dua-cli was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (disk-usage), 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
| dua-cli | gdu | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 6.4K | ★ 6.2K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 181 | ⑂ 251 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick dua-cli if
- You weight community size — 6.4K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick gdu if
- You want the gdu feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and gdu fits your workflow better
About dua-cli
dua ( Disk Usage Analyzer ) is a tool to conveniently learn about the usage of disk space of a given directory. It's parallel by default and will max out your SSD, providing relevant information as fast as possible. Optionally delete superfluous data, and do so more quickly than rm . Run dua i to launch the interactive mode for exploring and deleting files. Installation Binary Release MacOS MacOS via MacPorts: MacOS via Homebrew Linux Linux requires the target to be specified explicitly to obtain the MUSL build. Windows via Scoop Windows via WinGet Pre built Binaries See the [releases section][releases] for…
read the full dua-cli overview →
About gdu
go DiskUsage() Pretty fast disk usage analyzer written in Go. Gdu is intended primarily for SSD disks where it can fully utilize parallel processing. However HDDs work as well, but the performance gain is not so huge. Installation Head for the releases page and download the binary for your system. Using curl: curl L tar xz chmod +x gdu linux amd64 mv gdu linux amd64 /usr/bin/gdu See the installation page for other ways how to install Gdu to your system. Or you can use Gdu directly via Docker: docker run rm init interactive tty privileged volume /:/mnt/root ghcr.io/dundee/gdu /mnt/root Usage Examples gdu analyze…
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Frequently asked questions
Is dua-cli or gdu more popular?
dua-cli has 6,407 GitHub stars and gdu has 6,173. dua-cli has the larger community by that measure.
Are dua-cli and gdu free?
Both are open source. dua-cli is licensed under MIT and gdu under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between dua-cli and gdu?
dua-cli is written in Rust and gdu 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, dua-cli or gdu?
Choose dua-cli if you want the larger community (6,407 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose gdu if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.