head to head · open source
goaccess vs mailtrain
goaccess has 20,930 GitHub stars, 1,193 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. mailtrain has 5,751 stars, 707 forks, 116 open issues and last shipped 12 months ago. goaccess leads on adoption by 264% (20,930 vs 5,751 stars). goaccess is written in C under MIT; mailtrain is written in JavaScript under GPL-3.0. goaccess has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, mailtrain 12%. goaccess 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| goaccess | mailtrain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 5.8K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2025-10-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 707 |
| 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 mailtrain if
- You want the mailtrain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and mailtrain 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 mailtrain
Mailtrain is a self hosted newsletter application built on Node.js (v14 or later) with MySQL (v8 or later) or MariaDB (v10 or later) as the data store. Version 2 is a complete rewrite that mostly implements all features of version 1 while adding more, so it must be installed from scratch; existing v1 databases can be backed up and reused, as Mailtrain v2 is able to upgrade the schema. The project lives in the JavaScript ecosystem and is distributed under the GPL 3.0 license, with roughly 5,752 stars, 708 forks and 116 open issues on its repository, which has been active for about ten years with the last push in O…
read the full mailtrain overview →
More in Business Software
Related comparisons
More Marketing & Customer Engagement projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Marketing & Customer Engagement field.
Frequently asked questions
Is goaccess or mailtrain more popular?
goaccess has 20,930 GitHub stars and mailtrain has 5,751. goaccess has the larger community by that measure.
Are goaccess and mailtrain free?
Both are open source. goaccess is licensed under MIT and mailtrain under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between goaccess and mailtrain?
goaccess is written in C and mailtrain 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 mailtrain?
Choose goaccess if you want the larger community (20,930 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose mailtrain if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.