head to head · open source
lux vs gain
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars, 3,313 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. gain has 2,019 stars, 204 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. lux leads on adoption by 1,470% (31,694 vs 2,019 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; gain is written in Python under MIT. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, gain 10%. gain 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 | gain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 204 |
| 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 gain if
- You want the gain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and gain 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 gain
gain is an MIT licensed, asyncio based web crawling framework for Python that lets developers declare items and parsers while the framework handles concurrency, retries, and persistence on their behalf.
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or gain more popular?
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars and gain has 2,019. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and gain free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and gain under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and gain?
lux is written in Go and gain 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 gain?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,694 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose gain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.