head to head · open source
goaccess vs mailcheap
goaccess has 21,052 GitHub stars, 1,210 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped today. mailcheap has 933 stars, 233 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped today. goaccess leads on adoption by 2,156% (21,052 vs 933 stars). goaccess is written in C under MIT; mailcheap is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0. goaccess has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, mailcheap 25%. mailcheap 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
| goaccess | mailcheap | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 933 |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-15 | 2026-10-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 233 |
| 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 mailcheap if
- You want the mailcheap feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and mailcheap 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 mailcheap
MailCheap is an open source newsletter application in JavaScript — dashboard, public archive, REST API and MCP server in one Next.js app — for writers, teams and agent builders who want to keep their subscriber list in their own database and pay a sending provider per email instead of paying a platform per subscriber.
read the full mailcheap overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is goaccess or mailcheap more popular?
goaccess has 21,052 GitHub stars and mailcheap has 933. goaccess has the larger community by that measure.
Are goaccess and mailcheap free?
Both are open source. goaccess is licensed under MIT and mailcheap under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between goaccess and mailcheap?
goaccess is written in C and mailcheap in JavaScript. 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 mailcheap?
Choose goaccess if you want the larger community (21,052 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose mailcheap if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.