head to head · open source
lynis vs copacetic
lynis has 16,611 GitHub stars, 1,645 forks, 224 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. copacetic has 1,741 stars, 131 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. lynis leads on adoption by 854% (16,611 vs 1,741 stars). lynis is written in Shell under GPL-3.0; copacetic is written in Go under Apache-2.0. lynis has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, copacetic 8%. copacetic 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 | copacetic | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Shell | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 131 |
| 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 copacetic if
- You want the copacetic feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and copacetic 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 copacetic
Project Copacetic: Directly patch container image vulnerabilities copa is a CLI tool written in Go and based on buildkit that can be used to directly patch container images without full rebuilds. copa can also patch container images using the vulnerability scanning results from popular tools like Trivy. For more details and how to get started, please refer to full documentation. Ubuntu Chiseled images Copa supports both apt less Ubuntu images that retain a full /var/lib/dpkg/status file and native Chisel images that contain /var/lib/chisel/manifest.wall . Full status images support report driven and…
read the full copacetic overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lynis or copacetic more popular?
lynis has 16,611 GitHub stars and copacetic has 1,741. lynis has the larger community by that measure.
Are lynis and copacetic free?
Both are open source. lynis is licensed under GPL-3.0 and copacetic under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lynis and copacetic?
lynis is written in Shell and copacetic 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, lynis or copacetic?
Choose lynis if you want the larger community (16,611 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose copacetic if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.