head to head · open source
rea vs ctags
rea has 248,288 GitHub stars, 62,284 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped today. ctags has 7,296 stars, 671 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. rea leads on adoption by 3,303% (248,288 vs 7,296 stars). rea is written in TypeScript under MIT; ctags is written in C under GPL-2.0. rea has attracted 25% as many forks as stars, ctags 9%. rea was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (developer-tools), 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
| rea | ctags | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 248K | ★ 7.3K |
| License | MIT | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | C |
| Last push | 2026-10-15 | 2026-10-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 62K | ⑂ 671 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick rea if
- You weight community size — 248K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick ctags if
- You want the ctags 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 ctags fits your workflow better
About rea
REA is an open source MCP server and CLI that lets AI coding agents — and your terminal — reverse engineer native binaries, JavaScript and Electron apps, .NET assemblies, and websites, with evidence attached to every conclusion.
About ctags
Universal Ctags is a maintained implementation of ctags that generates an index, or tag file, of the language objects found in source files, and it is aimed at developers and at the authors of text editors and other tools that need to locate those indexed items across many programming languages.
read the full ctags overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is rea or ctags more popular?
rea has 248,288 GitHub stars and ctags has 7,296. rea has the larger community by that measure.
Are rea and ctags free?
Both are open source. rea is licensed under MIT and ctags under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rea and ctags?
rea is written in TypeScript and ctags 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, rea or ctags?
Choose rea if you want the larger community (248,288 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ctags if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.