head to head · open source
shannon vs api-relay-audit
shannon has 48,105 GitHub stars, 5,515 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. api-relay-audit has 839 stars, 80 forks, 26 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. shannon leads on adoption by 5,634% (48,105 vs 839 stars). shannon is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; api-relay-audit is written in Python under AGPL-3.0. shannon has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, api-relay-audit 10%. api-relay-audit was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-security), 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
| shannon | api-relay-audit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 839 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-08 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.5K | ⑂ 80 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick shannon if
- You weight community size — 48K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick api-relay-audit if
- You want the api-relay-audit feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and api-relay-audit fits your workflow better
About shannon
Shannon is an autonomous AI pentester for web applications and APIs that reads an application's source code, identifies attack paths, and executes real exploits so that only vulnerabilities with a working proof of concept are reported, built for AppSec, DevSecOps, and security engineering teams that ship code continuously.
read the full shannon overview →
About api-relay-audit
API Relay Audit is an independent, local security audit tool for AI API relays, mirrors, gateways, and LLM proxies. It is written in Python, released under the AGPL 3.0 license, and lives in the AI security and privacy ecosystem alongside the OpenAI compatible and Anthropic compatible proxy tooling it is designed to examine. The project is informed by the paper Your Agent Is Mine , Anthropic's September 10, 2026 threat intelligence report on fraudulent Claude resellers, and a September 11 disclosure by co author Chaofan Shou regarding router data containing user credentials. It ships both as a standalone script a…
read the full api-relay-audit overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is shannon or api-relay-audit more popular?
shannon has 48,105 GitHub stars and api-relay-audit has 839. shannon has the larger community by that measure.
Are shannon and api-relay-audit free?
Both are open source. shannon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and api-relay-audit under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between shannon and api-relay-audit?
shannon is written in TypeScript and api-relay-audit in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, shannon or api-relay-audit?
Choose shannon if you want the larger community (48,105 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose api-relay-audit if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.