head to head · open source
Insomnia vs go-restful
Insomnia has 40,021 GitHub stars, 2,365 forks, 874 open issues and last shipped yesterday. go-restful has 5,115 stars, 678 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. Insomnia leads on adoption by 682% (40,021 vs 5,115 stars). Insomnia is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; go-restful is written in Go under MIT. Insomnia has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, go-restful 13%. Insomnia 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
| Insomnia | go-restful | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 5.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 678 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Insomnia if
- You weight community size — 40K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick go-restful if
- You want the go-restful feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and go-restful fits your workflow better
About Insomnia
Insomnia is an open source, cross platform API client built with Electron and TypeScript for developing and testing APIs across multiple protocols including REST, GraphQL, WebSockets, SSE, and gRPC. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux and is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. The project serves as a direct open source alternative to Postman, offering similar core functionality without vendor lock in or mandatory cloud usage.
read the full Insomnia overview →
About go-restful
go restful is an MIT licensed Go package for building REST style web services in which the HTTP methods map one to one onto create, read, update and delete operations, and it is aimed at Go developers who want explicit, customizable control over routing, request parsing, response encoding and filter chains.
read the full go-restful overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Insomnia or go-restful more popular?
Insomnia has 40,021 GitHub stars and go-restful has 5,115. Insomnia has the larger community by that measure.
Are Insomnia and go-restful free?
Both are open source. Insomnia is licensed under Apache-2.0 and go-restful under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Insomnia and go-restful?
Insomnia is written in TypeScript and go-restful 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, Insomnia or go-restful?
Choose Insomnia if you want the larger community (40,021 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose go-restful if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.