head to head · open source
goaccess vs bruin
goaccess has 20,932 GitHub stars, 1,193 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. bruin has 1,709 stars, 90 forks, 60 open issues and last shipped yesterday. goaccess leads on adoption by 1,125% (20,932 vs 1,709 stars). goaccess is written in C under MIT; bruin is written in Go under Apache-2.0. goaccess has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, bruin 5%. bruin was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (analytics, data-analysis), 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
| goaccess | bruin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 90 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick goaccess if
- You weight community size — 21K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick bruin if
- You want the bruin feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and bruin fits your workflow better
About goaccess
GoAccess is an open source, real time web log analyzer and interactive viewer written in C and released under the MIT license. It parses web server logs and renders the results either in a terminal on nix systems or through a browser, updating every panel and metric every 200 milliseconds in the terminal output and every second in the HTML output. The project has been developed for roughly thirteen years and lives in the nix command line ecosystem, with a cluster of topics around analytics, Apache, Caddy, dashboards, and command line tooling.
read the full goaccess overview →
About bruin
Bruin is a data pipeline tool that brings together data ingestion, data transformation with SQL, Python & R, and data quality into a single framework. It works with all the major data platforms and runs on your local machine, an EC2 instance, or GitHub Actions. Bruin is packed with features: 📥 ingest data with ingestr / Python ✨ run SQL, Python & R transformations on many platforms 📐 table/view materializations, incremental tables 🐍 run Python in isolated environments using uv 💅 built in data quality checks 🚀 Jinja templating to avoid repetition ✅ validate pipelines end to end via dry run 👷 run on your loca…
read the full bruin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is goaccess or bruin more popular?
goaccess has 20,932 GitHub stars and bruin has 1,709. goaccess has the larger community by that measure.
Are goaccess and bruin free?
Both are open source. goaccess is licensed under MIT and bruin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between goaccess and bruin?
goaccess is written in C and bruin 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, goaccess or bruin?
Choose goaccess if you want the larger community (20,932 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose bruin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.