head to head · open source
rclone vs cloudreve
rclone has 59,830 GitHub stars, 5,407 forks, 1,273 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cloudreve has 28,727 stars, 3,892 forks, 147 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rclone leads on adoption by 108% (59,830 vs 28,727 stars). rclone is written in Go under MIT; cloudreve is written in Go under GPL-3.0. rclone has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cloudreve 14%. rclone was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (cloud-storage, golang), 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
| rclone | cloudreve | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 60K | ★ 29K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 3.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick rclone if
- You weight community size — 60K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cloudreve if
- You want the cloudreve 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 cloudreve fits your workflow better
About rclone
Rclone is an MIT licensed, Go based command line program that syncs files and directories to and from cloud storage providers, built for anyone who needs one tool for many backends instead of a separate client for every service.
read the full rclone overview →
About cloudreve
Cloudreve is a self hosted file management and sharing system written in Go that gives an organisation its own web file manager, sharing layer, and multi cloud storage gateway running on infrastructure it controls.
read the full cloudreve overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is rclone or cloudreve more popular?
rclone has 59,830 GitHub stars and cloudreve has 28,727. rclone has the larger community by that measure.
Are rclone and cloudreve free?
Both are open source. rclone is licensed under MIT and cloudreve under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rclone and cloudreve?
rclone is written in Go and cloudreve 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, rclone or cloudreve?
Choose rclone if you want the larger community (59,830 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cloudreve if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.