head to head · open source
lynis vs licensee
lynis has 16,688 GitHub stars, 1,651 forks, 224 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. licensee has 923 stars, 350 forks, 5 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. lynis leads on adoption by 1,708% (16,688 vs 923 stars). lynis is written in Shell under GPL-3.0; licensee is written in Ruby under MIT. lynis has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, licensee 38%. licensee 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 | licensee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 923 |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Shell | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-11-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 350 |
| 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 licensee if
- You want the licensee feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and licensee 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 licensee
Licensee A Ruby Gem to detect under what license a project is distributed. The problem You've got an open source project. How do you know what you can and can't do with the software? You've got a bunch of open source projects, how do you know what their licenses are? You've got a project with a license file, but which license is it? Has it been modified? The solution Licensee automates the process of reading LICENSE files and compares their contents to known licenses using several strategies (which we call "Matchers"). It attempts to determine a project's license in the following order: If the license file has…
read the full licensee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lynis or licensee more popular?
lynis has 16,688 GitHub stars and licensee has 923. lynis has the larger community by that measure.
Are lynis and licensee free?
Both are open source. lynis is licensed under GPL-3.0 and licensee under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lynis and licensee?
lynis is written in Shell and licensee in Ruby. 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 licensee?
Choose lynis if you want the larger community (16,688 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose licensee if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.