head to head · open source
salt vs event
salt has 15,661 GitHub stars, 5,610 forks, 1,885 open issues and last shipped yesterday. event has 578 stars, 69 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. salt leads on adoption by 2,610% (15,661 vs 578 stars). salt is written in Python under Apache-2.0; event is written in Go under MIT. salt has attracted 36% as many forks as stars, event 12%. salt was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (event-management), 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
| salt | event | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 578 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-07-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.6K | ⑂ 69 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick salt if
- You weight community size — 16K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick event if
- You want the event feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and event fits your workflow better
About salt
Salt is a Python based, event driven automation framework that deploys, configures and manages complex IT systems at scale, built for system administrators, platform and infrastructure engineers, and DevOps teams responsible for keeping many servers, virtual machines, containers, databases, web servers and network devices in a consistent desired state.
About event
gookit/event is a lightweight, MIT licensed event manager and dispatcher library written in Go, built for Go developers who need to register, prioritize, and fire application events inside a single process without adopting a full message broker.
read the full event overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is salt or event more popular?
salt has 15,661 GitHub stars and event has 578. salt has the larger community by that measure.
Are salt and event free?
Both are open source. salt is licensed under Apache-2.0 and event under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between salt and event?
salt is written in Python and event 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, salt or event?
Choose salt if you want the larger community (15,661 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose event if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.