head to head · open source
frp vs OpenVPN
frp has 110,395 GitHub stars, 15,306 forks, 48 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenVPN has 14,763 stars, 3,424 forks, 226 open issues and last shipped yesterday. frp leads on adoption by 648% (110,395 vs 14,763 stars). frp is written in Go under Apache-2.0; OpenVPN is written in C under a custom or non-standard licence. frp has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, OpenVPN 23%. OpenVPN 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
| frp | OpenVPN | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 110K | ★ 15K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 15K | ⑂ 3.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick frp if
- You weight community size — 110K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick OpenVPN if
- You want the OpenVPN feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and OpenVPN fits your workflow better
About frp
frp README 中文文档 Sponsors frp is an open source project with its ongoing development made possible entirely by the support of our awesome sponsors. If you'd like to join them, please consider sponsoring frp's development. Gold Sponsors High performance residential and ISP proxies for developers 90M+ residential IPs worldwide. Rotating IPs, sticky sessions, and traffic that never expires. From $0.55/GB. Use RAPID10 for 10% off. Try it for free. The complete IDE crafted for professional Go developers The sovereign cloud that puts you in control An open source, self hosted alternative to public clouds, built for…
About OpenVPN
OpenVPN A Secure tunneling daemon Copyright (C) 2002 2026 OpenVPN Inc. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. To get the latest release of OpenVPN, go to: To Build and Install, tar zxf openvpn .tar.gz cd openvpn ./configure make make install or see the file INSTALL for more info. For information on how to build OpenVPN on/for Windows with MinGW or MSVC see README.cmake.md. For detailed information on OpenVPN, including examples, see the man page For a sample VPN…
read the full OpenVPN overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is frp or OpenVPN more popular?
frp has 110,395 GitHub stars and OpenVPN has 14,763. frp has the larger community by that measure.
Are frp and OpenVPN free?
Both are open source. frp is licensed under Apache-2.0, and OpenVPN has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between frp and OpenVPN?
frp is written in Go and OpenVPN in C. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, frp or OpenVPN?
Choose frp if you want the larger community (110,395 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose OpenVPN if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.