head to head · open source
gofr vs litter
gofr has 20,817 GitHub stars, 1,790 forks, 132 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. litter has 1,655 stars, 61 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. gofr leads on adoption by 1,158% (20,817 vs 1,655 stars). gofr is written in Go under Apache-2.0; litter is written in Go under MIT. gofr has attracted 9% 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 | 2026-11-03 | 2026-05-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.8K | ⑂ 61 |
| 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
Go Fr GoFr: An Opinionated Microservice Development Framework Listed in the CNCF Landscape 🎯 Goal GoFr is designed to simplify microservice development , with a key focus on Kubernetes deployment and out of the box observability . While capable of building generic applications, microservices remain at its core. 💡 Key Features 1. Simple API Syntax 2. REST Standards by Default 3. Configuration Management 4. Observability (Logs, Traces, Metrics) 5. Inbuilt Auth Middleware & Custom Middleware Support 6. gRPC Support 7. HTTP Service with Circuit Breaker Support 8. Pub/Sub 9. Health Check for All Datasources 10…
About litter
Litter Litter is a pretty printer library for Go data structures to aid in debugging and testing. Litter is provided by Sanity: The Headless CMS Construction Kit Litter named for the fact that it outputs literals , which you litter your output with. As a side benefit, all Litter output is syntactically correct Go. You can use Litter to emit data during debug, and it's also really nice for "snapshot data" in unit tests, since it produces consistent, sorted output. Litter was inspired by Spew, but focuses on terseness and readability. Basic example This: will output: Use in tests Litter is a great alternative to…
read the full litter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gofr or litter more popular?
gofr has 20,817 GitHub stars and litter has 1,655. 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 (20,817 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose litter if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.