head to head · open source
tfsec vs ossec-hids
tfsec has 7,061 GitHub stars, 560 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped 8 months ago. ossec-hids has 5,070 stars, 1,074 forks, 125 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. tfsec leads on adoption by 39% (7,061 vs 5,070 stars). tfsec is written in Go under MIT; ossec-hids is written in C under GPL-2.0. tfsec has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, ossec-hids 21%. ossec-hids 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
| tfsec | ossec-hids | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 7.1K | ★ 5.1K |
| License | MIT | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-03-25 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 560 | ⑂ 1.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick tfsec if
- You weight community size — 7.1K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick ossec-hids if
- You want the ossec-hids feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and ossec-hids fits your workflow better
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 →
About ossec-hids
OSSEC v4.3.0 Information about OSSEC OSSEC is a full platform to monitor and control your systems. It mixes together all the aspects of HIDS (host based intrusion detection), log monitoring and SIM/SIEM together in a simple, powerful and open source solution. Visit our website for the latest information. www.ossec.net Current Releases The current stable releases are available on the ossec website. Releases can be downloaded from: Downloads Release documentation is available at: docs Development The development version is hosted on GitHub and just a simple git clone away. Screenshots File Integrity Monitoring…
read the full ossec-hids overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is tfsec or ossec-hids more popular?
tfsec has 7,061 GitHub stars and ossec-hids has 5,070. tfsec has the larger community by that measure.
Are tfsec and ossec-hids free?
Both are open source. tfsec is licensed under MIT and ossec-hids under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between tfsec and ossec-hids?
tfsec is written in Go and ossec-hids in C. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, tfsec or ossec-hids?
Choose tfsec if you want the larger community (7,061 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ossec-hids if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.