head to head · open source
ProjectDiscovery vs vuls
ProjectDiscovery has 31,290 GitHub stars, 3,876 forks, 107 open issues and last shipped yesterday. vuls has 12,263 stars, 1,243 forks, 92 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ProjectDiscovery leads on adoption by 155% (31,290 vs 12,263 stars). ProjectDiscovery is written in Go under MIT; vuls is written in Go under GPL-3.0. ProjectDiscovery has attracted 12% 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 2 topic tags (security, security-scanner), 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
| ProjectDiscovery | vuls | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.9K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick ProjectDiscovery if
- You weight community size — 31K 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 ProjectDiscovery
Nuclei is a high performance, open source vulnerability scanner built by ProjectDiscovery, part of the ProjectDiscovery ecosystem. It operates as a CLI tool using a simple YAML based DSL to define custom vulnerability checks, enabling precise, real world exploitation simulation to eliminate false positives.
read the full ProjectDiscovery 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 ProjectDiscovery or vuls more popular?
ProjectDiscovery has 31,290 GitHub stars and vuls has 12,263. ProjectDiscovery has the larger community by that measure.
Are ProjectDiscovery and vuls free?
Both are open source. ProjectDiscovery is licensed under MIT and vuls under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ProjectDiscovery and vuls?
ProjectDiscovery 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, ProjectDiscovery or vuls?
Choose ProjectDiscovery if you want the larger community (31,290 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose vuls if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.