head to head · open source
rclone vs ranger
rclone has 60,780 GitHub stars, 5,646 forks, 1,273 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ranger has 17,448 stars, 940 forks, 896 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. rclone leads on adoption by 248% (60,780 vs 17,448 stars). rclone is written in Go under MIT; ranger is written in Python under GPL-3.0. rclone has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, ranger 5%. rclone was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| rclone | ranger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 61K | ★ 17K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.6K | ⑂ 940 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick rclone if
- You weight community size — 61K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick ranger if
- You want the ranger feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and ranger fits your workflow better
About rclone
Website Documentation Download Contributing Changelog Installation Forum Rclone Rclone ("rsync for cloud storage") is a command line program to sync files and directories to and from different cloud storage providers. Storage providers 1Fichier :page facing up: Akamai Netstorage :page facing up: Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Object Storage System (OSS) :page facing up: Amazon S3 :page facing up: ArvanCloud Object Storage (AOS) :page facing up: Bizfly Cloud Simple Storage :page facing up: Backblaze B2 :page facing up: Box :page facing up: Ceph :page facing up: China Mobile Ecloud Elastic Object Storage (EOS) :page…
read the full rclone overview →
About ranger
Ranger 1.9.4 ============ Ranger is a console file manager with VI key bindings. It provides a minimalistic and nice curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy. It ships with rifle , a file launcher that is good at automatically finding out which program to use for what file type. For mc aficionados there's also the multi pane viewmode. This file describes ranger and how to get it to run. For instructions on the usage, please read the man page ( man ranger in a terminal). See HACKING.md for development specific information. For configuration, check the files in ranger/config/ or copy the default…
read the full ranger overview →
More in Productivity & Utilities
Related comparisons
More File Management & Sync projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the File Management & Sync field.
Frequently asked questions
Is rclone or ranger more popular?
rclone has 60,780 GitHub stars and ranger has 17,448. rclone has the larger community by that measure.
Are rclone and ranger free?
Both are open source. rclone is licensed under MIT and ranger under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rclone and ranger?
rclone is written in Go and ranger in Python. 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 ranger?
Choose rclone if you want the larger community (60,780 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ranger if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.