head to head · open source
hurl vs swag
hurl has 19,296 GitHub stars, 752 forks, 201 open issues and last shipped today. swag has 13,047 stars, 1,494 forks, 476 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. hurl leads on adoption by 48% (19,296 vs 13,047 stars). hurl is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; swag is written in Go under MIT. hurl has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, swag 11%. 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
| hurl | swag | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 19K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-09-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 752 | ⑂ 1.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick hurl if
- You weight community size — 19K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- 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 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…
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 hurl or swag more popular?
hurl has 19,296 GitHub stars and swag has 13,047. hurl has the larger community by that measure.
Are hurl and swag free?
Both are open source. hurl is licensed under Apache-2.0 and swag under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between hurl and swag?
hurl is written in Rust 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, hurl or swag?
Choose hurl if you want the larger community (19,296 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose swag if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.