head to head · open source
grpc-gateway vs swag
grpc-gateway has 20,012 GitHub stars, 2,415 forks, 149 open issues and last shipped yesterday. swag has 13,047 stars, 1,494 forks, 476 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. grpc-gateway leads on adoption by 53% (20,012 vs 13,047 stars). grpc-gateway is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause; swag is written in Go under MIT. grpc-gateway has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, swag 11%. grpc-gateway was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (openapi, swagger), 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
| grpc-gateway | swag | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 20K | ★ 13K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-09-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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 swag if
- You want the swag feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and swag 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 swag
swag 🌍 English ∙ 简体中文 ∙ Português Swag converts Go annotations to Swagger Documentation 2.0. We've created a variety of plugins for popular Go web frameworks. This allows you to quickly integrate with an existing Go project (using Swagger UI). Contents Getting started Supported Web Frameworks How to use it with Gin The swag formatter Implementation Status Declarative Comments Format General API Info API Operation Security Examples Descriptions over multiple lines User defined structure with an array type Function scoped struct declaration Model composition in response Add request headers Add response headers…
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Frequently asked questions
Is grpc-gateway or swag more popular?
grpc-gateway has 20,012 GitHub stars and swag has 13,047. grpc-gateway has the larger community by that measure.
Are grpc-gateway and swag free?
Both are open source. grpc-gateway is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and swag under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between grpc-gateway and swag?
grpc-gateway is written in Go and swag 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, grpc-gateway or swag?
Choose grpc-gateway if you want the larger community (20,012 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose swag if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.