head to head · open source
gokey vs rowel
gokey has 2,440 GitHub stars, 110 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. rowel has 964 stars, 82 forks, 24 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gokey leads on adoption by 153% (2,440 vs 964 stars). gokey is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause; rowel is written in Rust under GPL-3.0. gokey has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, rowel 9%. rowel was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (password-manager), 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
| gokey | rowel | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 2.4K | ★ 964 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-07-10 | 2026-11-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 110 | ⑂ 82 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick gokey if
- You weight community size — 2.4K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick rowel if
- You want the rowel feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and rowel fits your workflow better
About gokey
gokey A simple vaultless password manager in Go gokey is a password manager, which does not require a password vault. Instead of storing your passwords in a vault it derives your password on the fly from your master password and supplied realm string (for example, resource URL). This way you do not have to manage, backup or sync your password vault (or trust its management to a third party) as your passwords are available immediately anywhere. example options o by default gokey outputs generated data to stdout P path to master password file which will be used to generate other passwords/keys or to encrypt seed…
read the full gokey overview →
About rowel
Free Offline first Password Manager for MacOS, Windows and Linux. ❤️ it? Then ⭐️ it on GitHub or Tweet about it. Features Store Login/Password credentials Credit card Information Secure notes to store sensitive information One click Strong Password Generation Time based One Time Passwords support (TOTP) Google Drive Sync (optional) No data is leaving your computer: Your vault is a locally stored, encrypted SQLite database (SQLCipher); each entry's secrets are sealed in an extra application level AEAD layer Secrets stay encrypted at rest and in memory, decrypted only when you reveal or copy them Ability to…
read the full rowel overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gokey or rowel more popular?
gokey has 2,440 GitHub stars and rowel has 964. gokey has the larger community by that measure.
Are gokey and rowel free?
Both are open source. gokey is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and rowel under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gokey and rowel?
gokey is written in Go and rowel 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, gokey or rowel?
Choose gokey if you want the larger community (2,440 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose rowel if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.