head to head · open source
excelize vs lotus
excelize has 20,920 GitHub stars, 1,949 forks, 131 open issues and last shipped today. lotus has 1,837 stars, 134 forks, 35 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. excelize leads on adoption by 1,039% (20,920 vs 1,837 stars). excelize is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause; lotus is written in Python under MIT. excelize has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, lotus 7%. excelize was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (analytics), 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
| excelize | lotus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 1.8K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 134 |
| 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 lotus if
- You want the lotus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and lotus 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 lotus
Lotus: Pricing & Packaging Infrastructure For Any Business Model Usage Based, Per Seat, Bespoke Enterprise Plans And More Documentation • Lotus is a pricing and billing engine that enables SaaS companies to deploy, monitor, and experiment with custom subscriptions and complex models like usage based pricing. Lotus provides a flexible and modular control panel on top of your existing quote to cash stack that allows you to integrate data from multiple systems to help you figure out the optimal pricing scheme for your products. Getting Started :bust in silhouette: Self Hosted Version (currently the only version…
read the full lotus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is excelize or lotus more popular?
excelize has 20,920 GitHub stars and lotus has 1,837. excelize has the larger community by that measure.
Are excelize and lotus free?
Both are open source. excelize is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and lotus under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between excelize and lotus?
excelize is written in Go and lotus in Python. 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 lotus?
Choose excelize if you want the larger community (20,920 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose lotus if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.