head to head · open source
esbuild vs tsuru
esbuild has 40,063 GitHub stars, 1,346 forks, 622 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. tsuru has 5,311 stars, 551 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. esbuild leads on adoption by 654% (40,063 vs 5,311 stars). esbuild is written in Go under MIT; tsuru is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. esbuild has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, tsuru 10%. tsuru was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| esbuild | tsuru | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 5.3K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-08-09 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 551 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick esbuild if
- You weight community size — 40K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick tsuru if
- You want the tsuru feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tsuru fits your workflow better
About esbuild
esbuild is an MIT licensed, Go based bundler for the web that compiles JavaScript, CSS, TypeScript, and JSX in one tool, aimed at front end developers and teams whose current web build pipelines are slower than they need to be.
read the full esbuild overview →
About tsuru
tsuru is an open source, extensible Platform as a Service written in Go and released under the BSD 3 Clause license. It lives in the cloud native and DevOps ecosystem alongside Docker, Kubernetes, and the wider container tooling world, and it has been developed in public for roughly fifteen years. Rather than asking developers to think about servers, tsuru presents a platform on which applications are deployed as units and managed through a single command line client. The project describes itself as extensible, which reflects a design where the set of supported runtimes and backing services can be grown rather th…
read the full tsuru overview →
More in Developer Tools
Related comparisons
More Build & Deployment projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Build & Deployment field.
Frequently asked questions
Is esbuild or tsuru more popular?
esbuild has 40,063 GitHub stars and tsuru has 5,311. esbuild has the larger community by that measure.
Are esbuild and tsuru free?
Both are open source. esbuild is licensed under MIT and tsuru under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between esbuild and tsuru?
esbuild is written in Go and tsuru 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, esbuild or tsuru?
Choose esbuild if you want the larger community (40,063 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose tsuru if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.