head to head · open source
rclone vs vifm
rclone has 61,015 GitHub stars, 5,697 forks, 1,273 open issues and last shipped yesterday. vifm has 3,288 stars, 150 forks, 146 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. rclone leads on adoption by 1,756% (61,015 vs 3,288 stars). rclone is written in Go under MIT; vifm is written in C under GPL-2.0. rclone has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, vifm 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.
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Side by side
| rclone | vifm | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 61K | ★ 3.3K |
| License | MIT | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-14 | 2026-11-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.7K | ⑂ 150 |
| 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 vifm if
- You want the vifm 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 vifm 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 vifm
Vifm – Vim like file manager [![][AA]][A] [![][FF]][F] [![][UU]][U] [![][SS]][S] Vifm is a curses based Vim like file manager extended with some useful ideas from mutt. If you use Vim, Vifm gives you complete keyboard control over your files without having to learn a new set of commands. It goes not just about Vim like keybindings, but also about modes, options, registers, commands and other things you might already like in Vim. Just like Vim, Vifm tries to adhere to the Unix philosophy. So instead of working solutions which are set in stone user is provided with a set of means for customization of Vifm to one's…
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Frequently asked questions
Is rclone or vifm more popular?
rclone has 61,015 GitHub stars and vifm has 3,288. rclone has the larger community by that measure.
Are rclone and vifm free?
Both are open source. rclone is licensed under MIT and vifm under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rclone and vifm?
rclone is written in Go and vifm 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, rclone or vifm?
Choose rclone if you want the larger community (61,015 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose vifm if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.