head to head · open source
fastapi vs go-restful
fastapi has 102,402 GitHub stars, 9,903 forks, 78 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. go-restful has 5,115 stars, 678 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. fastapi leads on adoption by 1,902% (102,402 vs 5,115 stars). fastapi is written in Python under MIT; go-restful is written in Go under MIT. fastapi has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, go-restful 13%. fastapi was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (openapi), 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
| fastapi | go-restful | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 102K | ★ 5.1K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.9K | ⑂ 678 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick fastapi if
- You weight community size — 102K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick go-restful if
- You want the go-restful feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and go-restful fits your workflow better
About fastapi
FastAPI is an MIT licensed, high performance Python web framework for building APIs with standard Python type hints, aimed at Python developers and teams that need production ready HTTP services with automatic OpenAPI documentation.
read the full fastapi overview →
About go-restful
go restful is an MIT licensed Go package for building REST style web services in which the HTTP methods map one to one onto create, read, update and delete operations, and it is aimed at Go developers who want explicit, customizable control over routing, request parsing, response encoding and filter chains.
read the full go-restful overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is fastapi or go-restful more popular?
fastapi has 102,402 GitHub stars and go-restful has 5,115. fastapi has the larger community by that measure.
Are fastapi and go-restful free?
Both are open source. fastapi is licensed under MIT and go-restful under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between fastapi and go-restful?
fastapi is written in Python and go-restful 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, fastapi or go-restful?
Choose fastapi if you want the larger community (102,402 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose go-restful if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.