head to head · open source
goaccess vs rita-legacy
goaccess has 20,932 GitHub stars, 1,193 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. rita-legacy has 2,510 stars, 351 forks, 87 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. goaccess leads on adoption by 734% (20,932 vs 2,510 stars). goaccess is written in C under MIT; rita-legacy is written in Go under GPL-3.0. goaccess has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, rita-legacy 14%. goaccess 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 | rita-legacy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-01-12 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 351 |
| 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 rita-legacy if
- You want the rita-legacy feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and rita-legacy 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 rita-legacy
:exclamation: Important Notice :exclamation: This repository has been archived and is no longer maintained. The project has undergone a complete rewrite and significant improvements. The new version of this project can be found here. RITA (Real Intelligence Threat Analytics) (Legacy) If you get value out of RITA and would like to go a step further with hunting automation, futuristic visualizations, and data encrichment take a look at AC Hunter. Sponsored by Active Countermeasures. RITA is an open source framework for network traffic analysis. The framework ingests Zeek Logs in TSV format, and currently supports t…
read the full rita-legacy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is goaccess or rita-legacy more popular?
goaccess has 20,932 GitHub stars and rita-legacy has 2,510. goaccess has the larger community by that measure.
Are goaccess and rita-legacy free?
Both are open source. goaccess is licensed under MIT and rita-legacy under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between goaccess and rita-legacy?
goaccess is written in C and rita-legacy 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 rita-legacy?
Choose goaccess if you want the larger community (20,932 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose rita-legacy if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.