head to head · open source
Zitadel vs gokey
Zitadel has 15,522 GitHub stars, 1,420 forks, 1,171 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. gokey has 2,440 stars, 110 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. Zitadel leads on adoption by 536% (15,522 vs 2,440 stars). Zitadel is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; gokey is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. Zitadel has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, gokey 5%. Zitadel was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Zitadel | gokey | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-07-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 110 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Zitadel if
- You weight community size — 16K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick gokey if
- You want the gokey feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and gokey fits your workflow better
About Zitadel
The Identity Infrastructure for Developers ZITADEL is an open source identity and access management platform built for teams that need more than basic auth. Whether you're securing a SaaS product, building a B2B platform, or self hosting a production IAM stack — ZITADEL gives you everything out of the box: SSO, MFA, Passkeys, OIDC, SAML, SCIM, and a battle tested multi tenancy model. No vendor lock in. No compromise on control. Just a robust, API first identity platform you can own. 🏡 Website 💬 Chat 📋 Docs 🧑💻 Blog 📞 Contact Why ZITADEL We built ZITADEL to handle the hardest IAM challenges at scale —…
read the full Zitadel overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Zitadel or gokey more popular?
Zitadel has 15,522 GitHub stars and gokey has 2,440. Zitadel has the larger community by that measure.
Are Zitadel and gokey free?
Both are open source. Zitadel is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and gokey under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Zitadel and gokey?
Zitadel is written in Go and gokey 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, Zitadel or gokey?
Choose Zitadel if you want the larger community (15,522 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose gokey if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.