head to head · open source
goaccess vs phplist3
goaccess has 20,930 GitHub stars, 1,193 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. phplist3 has 871 stars, 290 forks, 92 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. goaccess leads on adoption by 2,303% (20,930 vs 871 stars). goaccess is written in C under MIT; phplist3 is written in PHP under AGPL-3.0. goaccess has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, phplist3 33%. 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.
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Side by side
| goaccess | phplist3 | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 871 |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 290 |
| 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 phplist3 if
- You want the phplist3 feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and phplist3 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 phplist3
phpList 3 is a fully functional open source email marketing manager, written in PHP and released under the AGPL 3.0 licence, for creating, sending, integrating and analysing email campaigns and newsletters, aimed at organisations that want to run campaign infrastructure on their own server rather than hand it to a third party.
read the full phplist3 overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is goaccess or phplist3 more popular?
goaccess has 20,930 GitHub stars and phplist3 has 871. goaccess has the larger community by that measure.
Are goaccess and phplist3 free?
Both are open source. goaccess is licensed under MIT and phplist3 under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between goaccess and phplist3?
goaccess is written in C and phplist3 in PHP. 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 phplist3?
Choose goaccess if you want the larger community (20,930 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose phplist3 if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.