head to head · open source
restic vs Plakar
restic has 36,523 GitHub stars, 1,918 forks, 622 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Plakar has 2,086 stars, 98 forks, 123 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. restic leads on adoption by 1,651% (36,523 vs 2,086 stars). restic is written in Go under BSD-2-Clause; Plakar is written in Go under ISC. restic has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, Plakar 5%. restic was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (deduplication), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| restic | Plakar | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 37K | ★ 2.1K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | ISC |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-11 | 2026-10-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 98 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick restic if
- You weight community size — 37K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Plakar if
- You want the Plakar feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the ISC license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Plakar fits your workflow better
About restic
restic is a fast, secure, efficient backup program written in Go for Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD and OpenBSD users who want verifiable, encrypted backups stored to a backend of their choosing.
read the full restic overview →
About Plakar
Plakar is an open source backup engine written in Go for the infrastructure and operations ecosystem. It is powered by Kloset, an immutable data store, and it uses the ptar format for self contained archives. Plakar creates snapshots of data, stores them in encrypted and deduplicated repositories, and lets users inspect, verify, and restore the snapshots later.
read the full Plakar overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Backup & Recovery projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Backup & Recovery field.
Frequently asked questions
Is restic or Plakar more popular?
restic has 36,523 GitHub stars and Plakar has 2,086. restic has the larger community by that measure.
Are restic and Plakar free?
Both are open source. restic is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and Plakar under ISC. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between restic and Plakar?
restic is written in Go and Plakar 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, restic or Plakar?
Choose restic if you want the larger community (36,523 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose Plakar if its feature set, stack or ISC licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.