head to head · open source
lynis vs agent-governance-toolkit
lynis has 16,611 GitHub stars, 1,645 forks, 224 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. agent-governance-toolkit has 6,509 stars, 1,123 forks, 176 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lynis leads on adoption by 155% (16,611 vs 6,509 stars). lynis is written in Shell under GPL-3.0; agent-governance-toolkit is written in Python under MIT. lynis has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, agent-governance-toolkit 17%. agent-governance-toolkit was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (compliance), 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
| lynis | agent-governance-toolkit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Shell | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick lynis if
- You weight community size — 17K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Shell
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick agent-governance-toolkit if
- You want the agent-governance-toolkit feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and agent-governance-toolkit fits your workflow better
About lynis
[Documentation] [Documentation]: Do you like this software? Star the project and become a stargazer. lynis Lynis Security auditing and hardening tool, for UNIX based systems. Lynis is a security auditing tool for systems based on UNIX like Linux, macOS, BSD, and others. It performs an in depth security scan and runs on the system itself. The primary goal is to test security defenses and provide tips for further system hardening . It will also scan for general system information, vulnerable software packages, and possible configuration issues. Lynis was commonly used by system administrators and auditors to…
read the full lynis overview →
About agent-governance-toolkit
🌍 English 日本語 简体中文 한국어 Agent Governance Toolkit Ship agents to production without losing sleep 🚀 Quick Start · 📋 Specifications · 📦 PyPI · 📝 Changelog brightgreen) [!IMPORTANT] Public Preview production quality public preview releases. May have breaking changes before GA. Policy enforcement, identity, sandboxing, and SRE for autonomous AI agents. One pip install , any framework. The Problem Your AI agents call tools, browse the web, query databases, and delegate to other agents. Once deployed, they make decisions autonomously. You need answers to three questions: 1. Is this action allowed? An agent with…
read the full agent-governance-toolkit overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lynis or agent-governance-toolkit more popular?
lynis has 16,611 GitHub stars and agent-governance-toolkit has 6,509. lynis has the larger community by that measure.
Are lynis and agent-governance-toolkit free?
Both are open source. lynis is licensed under GPL-3.0 and agent-governance-toolkit under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lynis and agent-governance-toolkit?
lynis is written in Shell and agent-governance-toolkit 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, lynis or agent-governance-toolkit?
Choose lynis if you want the larger community (16,611 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose agent-governance-toolkit if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.