head to head · open source
rclone vs xplr
rclone has 60,859 GitHub stars, 5,662 forks, 1,273 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. xplr has 4,851 stars, 97 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 14 days ago. rclone leads on adoption by 1,155% (60,859 vs 4,851 stars). rclone is written in Go under MIT; xplr is written in Rust under MIT. rclone has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, xplr 2%. 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 | xplr | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 61K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-07 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.7K | ⑂ 97 |
| 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 xplr if
- You want the xplr feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and xplr 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 xplr
▸[ xplr] A hackable, minimal, fast TUI file explorer [ Install ] [ Documentation ] [ Hacks ] [ Plugins ] [ Integrations ] xplr is a terminal UI based file explorer that aims to increase our terminal productivity by being a flexible, interactive orchestrator for the ever growing awesome command line utilities that work with the file system. To achieve its goal, xplr strives to be a fast, minimal and more importantly, hackable file explorer. xplr is not meant to be a replacement for the standard shell commands or the GUI file managers. Rather, it aims to [integrate them all][14] and expose an intuitive…
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 xplr more popular?
rclone has 60,859 GitHub stars and xplr has 4,851. rclone has the larger community by that measure.
Are rclone and xplr free?
Both are open source. rclone is licensed under MIT and xplr under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rclone and xplr?
rclone is written in Go and xplr in Rust. 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 xplr?
Choose rclone if you want the larger community (60,859 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose xplr if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.