head to head · open source
goaccess vs roapi
goaccess has 20,932 GitHub stars, 1,193 forks, 449 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. roapi has 3,434 stars, 209 forks, 66 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. goaccess leads on adoption by 510% (20,932 vs 3,434 stars). goaccess is written in C under MIT; roapi is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. goaccess has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, roapi 6%. 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 | roapi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 3.4K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-03-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 209 |
| 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 roapi if
- You want the roapi 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 roapi 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 roapi
ROAPI ROAPI automatically spins up read only APIs for static datasets without requiring you to write a single line of code. It builds on top of Apache Arrow and Datafusion. The core of its design can be boiled down to the following: Query frontends to translate SQL, FlightSQL, GraphQL and REST API queries into Datafusion plans. Datafusion for query plan execution. Data layer to load datasets from a variety of sources and formats with automatic schema inference. Response encoding layer to serialize intermediate Arrow record batch into various formats requested by client. See below for a high level diagram: Install…
read the full roapi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is goaccess or roapi more popular?
goaccess has 20,932 GitHub stars and roapi has 3,434. goaccess has the larger community by that measure.
Are goaccess and roapi free?
Both are open source. goaccess is licensed under MIT and roapi under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between goaccess and roapi?
goaccess is written in C and roapi 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 roapi?
Choose goaccess if you want the larger community (20,932 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose roapi if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.