head to head · open source
gofr vs litter
gofr has 20,909 GitHub stars, 1,760 forks, 132 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. litter has 1,654 stars, 60 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. gofr leads on adoption by 1,164% (20,909 vs 1,654 stars). gofr is written in Go under Apache-2.0; litter is written in Go under MIT. gofr has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, litter 4%. gofr was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (go, golang, logging), 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
| gofr | litter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-05-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.8K | ⑂ 60 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick gofr if
- You weight community size — 21K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick litter if
- You want the litter feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and litter fits your workflow better
About gofr
GoFr is an opinionated Go framework for building microservices, aimed at Go developers and platform teams who want HTTP, gRPC, data access and observability built in rather than assembled from separate libraries.
About litter
Litter is a Go pretty printer library that renders data structures as syntactically correct Go literals, built for developers who need readable output while debugging and stable, comparable snapshots in unit tests.
read the full litter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gofr or litter more popular?
gofr has 20,909 GitHub stars and litter has 1,654. gofr has the larger community by that measure.
Are gofr and litter free?
Both are open source. gofr is licensed under Apache-2.0 and litter under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gofr and litter?
gofr is written in Go and litter 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, gofr or litter?
Choose gofr if you want the larger community (20,909 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose litter if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.