head to head · open source
pentagi vs vuls
pentagi has 24,708 GitHub stars, 3,177 forks, 71 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. vuls has 12,263 stars, 1,243 forks, 92 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pentagi leads on adoption by 101% (24,708 vs 12,263 stars). pentagi is written in Go under MIT; vuls is written in Go under GPL-3.0. pentagi has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, vuls 10%. vuls was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (golang, security-automation, security-tools), 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
| pentagi | vuls | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-10 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick pentagi if
- You weight community size — 25K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick vuls if
- You want the vuls feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and vuls fits your workflow better
About pentagi
PentAGI is an MIT licensed, self hosted multi agent system written in Go that runs fully autonomous AI agents to perform complex penetration testing tasks inside an isolated Docker sandbox, built for information security professionals, researchers, and enthusiasts.
read the full pentagi overview →
About vuls
Vuls is an agent less vulnerability scanner written in Go and licensed under GPL 3.0, aimed at system administrators and security teams that must find and track known vulnerabilities across Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and macOS hosts, containers, WordPress installs, programming language libraries and network devices without installing an agent on every machine.
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Frequently asked questions
Is pentagi or vuls more popular?
pentagi has 24,708 GitHub stars and vuls has 12,263. pentagi has the larger community by that measure.
Are pentagi and vuls free?
Both are open source. pentagi is licensed under MIT and vuls under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between pentagi and vuls?
pentagi is written in Go and vuls 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, pentagi or vuls?
Choose pentagi if you want the larger community (24,708 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose vuls if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.