head to head · open source
excelize vs BillionMail
excelize has 20,918 GitHub stars, 1,949 forks, 131 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. BillionMail has 15,611 stars, 1,702 forks, 239 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. excelize leads on adoption by 34% (20,918 vs 15,611 stars). excelize is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause; BillionMail is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. excelize has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, BillionMail 11%. excelize 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.
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Side by side
| excelize | BillionMail | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 16K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-06-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick excelize if
- You weight community size — 21K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick BillionMail if
- You want the BillionMail feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and BillionMail fits your workflow better
About excelize
Excelize is a pure Go library for reading and writing XLAM, XLSM, XLSX, XLTM and XLTX spreadsheets, built for Go developers who need to generate or parse Microsoft Excel 2007 and later workbooks directly from their own code.
read the full excelize overview →
About BillionMail
BillionMail is an open source mail server, newsletter, and email marketing platform that runs entirely on infrastructure the operator controls. It is written in Go and released under the AGPL 3.0 license, and it lives in the self hosted email and marketing ecosystem alongside the mail transfer and delivery components it bundles, including Postfix, Dovecot, and Rspamd. The project ships as a complete stack rather than a single binary, combining a sending server, a campaign manager, and a webmail client so that one deployment covers transactional mail, promotional campaigns, and newsletters.
read the full BillionMail overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is excelize or BillionMail more popular?
excelize has 20,918 GitHub stars and BillionMail has 15,611. excelize has the larger community by that measure.
Are excelize and BillionMail free?
Both are open source. excelize is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and BillionMail under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between excelize and BillionMail?
excelize is written in Go and BillionMail 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, excelize or BillionMail?
Choose excelize if you want the larger community (20,918 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose BillionMail if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.