head to head · open source
grpc-gateway vs hurl
grpc-gateway has 20,012 GitHub stars, 2,415 forks, 149 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hurl has 19,296 stars, 752 forks, 200 open issues and last shipped yesterday. grpc-gateway leads on adoption by 4% (20,012 vs 19,296 stars). grpc-gateway is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause; hurl is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. grpc-gateway has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, hurl 4%. hurl 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
| grpc-gateway | hurl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 20K | ★ 19K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 752 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick grpc-gateway if
- You weight community size — 20K 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 hurl if
- You want the hurl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and hurl fits your workflow better
About grpc-gateway
gRPC Gateway gRPC to JSON proxy generator following the gRPC HTTP spec About The gRPC Gateway is a plugin of the Google protocol buffers compiler protoc. It reads protobuf service definitions and generates a reverse proxy server which translates a RESTful HTTP API into gRPC. This server is generated according to the google.api.http annotations in your service definitions. This helps you provide your APIs in both gRPC and RESTful style at the same time. Docs You can read our docs at: Testimonials We use the gRPC Gateway to serve millions of API requests per day, and have been since 2018 and through all of that…
read the full grpc-gateway overview →
About hurl
What's Hurl? Hurl is a command line tool that runs HTTP requests defined in a simple plain text format . It can chain requests, capture values and evaluate queries on headers and body response. Hurl is very versatile: it can be used for both fetching data and testing HTTP sessions. Hurl makes it easy to work with HTML content, REST / SOAP / GraphQL APIs, or any other XML / JSON based APIs. Chaining multiple requests is easy: Also an HTTP Test Tool Hurl can run HTTP requests but can also be used to test HTTP responses . Different types of queries and predicates are supported, from [XPath] and [JSONPath] on body…
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Frequently asked questions
Is grpc-gateway or hurl more popular?
grpc-gateway has 20,012 GitHub stars and hurl has 19,296. grpc-gateway has the larger community by that measure.
Are grpc-gateway and hurl free?
Both are open source. grpc-gateway is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and hurl under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between grpc-gateway and hurl?
grpc-gateway is written in Go and hurl 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, grpc-gateway or hurl?
Choose grpc-gateway if you want the larger community (20,012 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose hurl if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.