head to head · open source
Gogs vs go-git
Gogs has 47,914 GitHub stars, 5,076 forks, 1,009 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. go-git has 7,841 stars, 1,072 forks, 248 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Gogs leads on adoption by 511% (47,914 vs 7,841 stars). Gogs is written in Go under MIT; go-git is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Gogs has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, go-git 14%. go-git was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (git), 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
| Gogs | go-git | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 7.8K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-31 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.1K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Gogs if
- You weight community size — 48K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick go-git if
- You want the go-git feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and go-git fits your workflow better
About Gogs
👉 Deploy on DigitalOcean and get $200 in free credits ! 🔮 Vision The Gogs ( /gɑgz/ ) project aims to build a simple, stable and extensible self hosted Git service that can be set up in the most painless way. With Go, this can be done with an independent binary distribution across all platforms that Go supports, including Linux, macOS, Windows and ARM based systems. 📡 Overview Please visit our home page for user documentation. Please refer to CHANGELOG.md for list of changes in each releases. Want to try it before doing anything else? Do it online! Having trouble? Help yourself with troubleshooting or ask…
About go-git
go git is a highly extensible git implementation library written in pure Go . It can be used to manipulate git repositories at low level (plumbing) or high level (porcelain) , through an idiomatic Go API. It also supports several types of storage, such as in memory filesystems, or custom implementations, thanks to the Storer interface. It has been actively developed since 2015 and is used extensively by Keybase, Gitea, and Pulumi, among many other libraries and tools. It is also a dependency in major CNCF projects such as Kubernetes Prow and Flux. Project Status For the full backstory see HISTORY.md. The project…
read the full go-git overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Gogs or go-git more popular?
Gogs has 47,914 GitHub stars and go-git has 7,841. Gogs has the larger community by that measure.
Are Gogs and go-git free?
Both are open source. Gogs is licensed under MIT and go-git under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Gogs and go-git?
Gogs is written in Go and go-git 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, Gogs or go-git?
Choose Gogs if you want the larger community (47,914 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose go-git if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.