head to head · open source
effect vs retina
effect has 17,476 GitHub stars, 895 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. retina has 3,185 stars, 308 forks, 190 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. effect leads on adoption by 449% (17,476 vs 3,185 stars). effect is written in TypeScript under MIT; retina is written in Go under MIT. effect has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, retina 10%. effect was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (observability), 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
| effect | retina | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 3.2K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 895 | ⑂ 308 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick effect if
- You weight community size — 17K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick retina if
- You want the retina feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and retina fits your workflow better
About effect
Effect Effect is a library for building robust, maintainable, type safe, and production grade applications in TypeScript. It helps you handle the hard problems at scale: typed errors, dependency injection, structured concurrency, scheduling, tracing, and unified schema validation. Effect V4 is currently a release candidate. The main branch contains v4 development. Install V4 RC Requirements TypeScript 5.9 or newer. TypeScript 7 is recommended for the best performance and compatibility with Effect's TypeScript tooling. Node.js 18 or newer is the general minimum for running Effect on Node.js. Some integration…
read the full effect overview →
About retina
[![goreport][goreport img]][goreport] ![GitHub release][release img] [![retina publish][godoc badge]][godoc] ![license] [![retina test][retina test image badge]][retina test image] [![retinash][retinash badge]][retinash] [![retina publish][retina publish badge]][retina publish] ![retina codeql img][retina codeql badge] ![retina golangci lint img][retina golangci lint badge] Overview Retina is a cloud agnostic, open source Kubernetes network observability platform that provides a centralized hub for monitoring application health, network health, and security . It provides actionable insights to cluster network…
read the full retina overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is effect or retina more popular?
effect has 17,476 GitHub stars and retina has 3,185. effect has the larger community by that measure.
Are effect and retina free?
Both are open source. effect is licensed under MIT and retina under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between effect and retina?
effect is written in TypeScript and retina 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, effect or retina?
Choose effect if you want the larger community (17,476 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose retina if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.