head to head · open source
lynis vs tfsec
lynis has 16,611 GitHub stars, 1,645 forks, 224 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. tfsec has 7,059 stars, 560 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. lynis leads on adoption by 135% (16,611 vs 7,059 stars). lynis is written in Shell under GPL-3.0; tfsec is written in Go under MIT. lynis has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, tfsec 8%. lynis was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (compliance, devops), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| lynis | tfsec | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Shell | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-03-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 560 |
| 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 tfsec if
- You want the tfsec feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and tfsec 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 tfsec
📣 tfsec to Trivy Migration As part of our goal to provide a comprehensive open source security solution for all, we have been consolidating all of our scanning related efforts in one place, and that is Trivy. Over the past year, tfsec has laid the foundations to Trivy's IaC & misconfigurations scanning capabilities, including Terraform scanning, which has been natively supported in Trivy for a long time now. Going forward we want to encourage the tfsec community to transition over to Trivy. Moving to Trivy gives you the same excellent Terraform scanning engine, with some extra benefits: 1. Access to more…
read the full tfsec overview →
More in Business Software
Related comparisons
More Compliance & Risk Management projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Compliance & Risk Management field.
Frequently asked questions
Is lynis or tfsec more popular?
lynis has 16,611 GitHub stars and tfsec has 7,059. lynis has the larger community by that measure.
Are lynis and tfsec free?
Both are open source. lynis is licensed under GPL-3.0 and tfsec under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lynis and tfsec?
lynis is written in Shell and tfsec 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 tfsec?
Choose lynis if you want the larger community (16,611 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose tfsec if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.