head to head · open source
lux vs freeproxy
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars, 3,313 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. freeproxy has 547 stars, 95 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped today. lux leads on adoption by 5,694% (31,694 vs 547 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; freeproxy is written in Python under Apache-2.0. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, freeproxy 17%. freeproxy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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
| lux | freeproxy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 547 |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 95 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick lux if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick freeproxy if
- You want the freeproxy feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and freeproxy fits your workflow better
About lux
Lux is a video download library and command line tool written in Go, released under the MIT license. It ships as a single lux binary that takes one or more URLs and retrieves the underlying media streams, and it also exposes the downloading logic as a Go library that other programs can embed. The project has existed for roughly nine years and lives in the Go ecosystem, distributed through go install alongside the usual operating system package managers.
About freeproxy
FreeProxy is an Apache 2.0 Python project that continuously discovers, verifies, and republishes free HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4, and SOCKS5 proxies scraped from dozens of public share sources, aimed at developers running crawlers, spiders, and data analysis pipelines who need a changing pool of proxies without paying a provider.
read the full freeproxy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or freeproxy more popular?
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars and freeproxy has 547. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and freeproxy free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and freeproxy under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and freeproxy?
lux is written in Go and freeproxy in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, lux or freeproxy?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,694 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose freeproxy if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.