head to head · open source
Kodi vs gonic
Kodi has 21,422 GitHub stars, 6,655 forks, 466 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gonic has 2,643 stars, 167 forks, 72 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Kodi leads on adoption by 711% (21,422 vs 2,643 stars). Kodi is written in C++ under a custom or non-standard licence; gonic is written in Go under GPL-3.0. Kodi has attracted 31% as many forks as stars, gonic 6%. Kodi 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
| Kodi | gonic | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 2.6K |
| License | Custom / other | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C++ | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.7K | ⑂ 167 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Kodi if
- You weight community size — 21K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick gonic if
- You want the gonic feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and gonic fits your workflow better
About Kodi
website • docs • community • add ons Welcome to Kodi Home Theater Software! Kodi is an award winning free and open source software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. Available as a native application for Android, Linux, BSD, macOS, iOS, tvOS and Windows operating systems , Kodi runs on most common processor architectures. Created in 2003 by a group of like minded programmers, Kodi is a non profit project run by the XBMC Foundation and developed by volunteers located around the world. More than 500 software developers have contributed to Kodi to date, and 100 plus translators have worked to…
About gonic
free software subsonic server API implementation, supporting its many clients features browsing by folder (keeping your full tree intact) see here browsing by tags (using taglib supports mp3, opus, flac, ape, m4a, wav, etc.) on the fly audio transcoding and caching (requires ffmpeg) (thank you spijet) subsonic jukebox mode, for gapless server side audio playback instead of streaming (thank you lxea) support for podcasts (thank you lxea) pretty fast scanning (with my library of 50k tracks, initial scan takes about 10m, and about 6s after incrementally) multiple users, each with their own transcoding preferences…
read the full gonic overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Kodi or gonic more popular?
Kodi has 21,422 GitHub stars and gonic has 2,643. Kodi has the larger community by that measure.
Are Kodi and gonic free?
Both are open source. Kodi has no licence declared in this registry, and gonic is licensed under GPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Kodi and gonic?
Kodi is written in C++ and gonic 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, Kodi or gonic?
Choose Kodi if you want the larger community (21,422 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose gonic if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.