head to head · open source
lux vs pdf_oxide
lux has 31,686 GitHub stars, 3,312 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. pdf_oxide has 1,033 stars, 129 forks, 322 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lux leads on adoption by 2,967% (31,686 vs 1,033 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; pdf_oxide is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, pdf_oxide 12%. pdf_oxide 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
| lux | pdf_oxide | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 129 |
| 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 pdf_oxide if
- You want the pdf_oxide feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and pdf_oxide 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 pdf_oxide
PDFOxide is a Rust core PDF toolkit with bindings for nineteen additional languages, plus a command line tool and an MCP server, aimed at developers and data teams that need fast, permissively licensed text extraction, image extraction, markdown conversion, and PDF creation and editing.
read the full pdf_oxide overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or pdf_oxide more popular?
lux has 31,686 GitHub stars and pdf_oxide has 1,033. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and pdf_oxide free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and pdf_oxide under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and pdf_oxide?
lux is written in Go and pdf_oxide in Rust. 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 pdf_oxide?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,686 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pdf_oxide if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.