head to head · open source
goaccess vs dbt
goaccess has 20,930 GitHub stars, 1,193 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. dbt has 13,851 stars, 2,567 forks, 1,534 open issues and last shipped yesterday. goaccess leads on adoption by 51% (20,930 vs 13,851 stars). goaccess is written in C under MIT; dbt is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. goaccess has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, dbt 19%. dbt 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
| goaccess | dbt | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 2.6K |
| 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 dbt if
- You want the dbt feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and dbt 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 dbt
dbt is an open source data transformation framework that lets data analysts and engineers transform their data using the same practices software engineers use to build applications, and it is aimed at analytics teams that model data inside a warehouse.
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Frequently asked questions
Is goaccess or dbt more popular?
goaccess has 20,930 GitHub stars and dbt has 13,851. goaccess has the larger community by that measure.
Are goaccess and dbt free?
Both are open source. goaccess is licensed under MIT and dbt under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between goaccess and dbt?
goaccess is written in C and dbt in Rust. 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 dbt?
Choose goaccess if you want the larger community (20,930 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose dbt if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.