head to head · open source
suricata vs Tirreno
suricata has 6,652 GitHub stars, 1,768 forks, 86 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Tirreno has 1,518 stars, 180 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. suricata leads on adoption by 338% (6,652 vs 1,518 stars). suricata is written in C under GPL-2.0; Tirreno is written in PHP under AGPL-3.0. suricata has attracted 27% as many forks as stars, Tirreno 12%. suricata 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.
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Side by side
| suricata | Tirreno | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 6.7K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | GPL-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-08-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.8K | ⑂ 180 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick suricata if
- You weight community size — 6.7K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Tirreno if
- You want the Tirreno feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and Tirreno fits your workflow better
About suricata
Suricata is a network Intrusion Detection System (IDS), Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and Network Security Monitoring (NSM) engine developed by the OISF and the Suricata community, released under GPL 2.0 and written in C, for security teams that need to detect, block and record activity on the networks they operate.
read the full suricata overview →
About Tirreno
Tirreno is an open source security framework written in PHP and backed by PostgreSQL under AGPL 3.0. It lives in the application security and fraud prevention ecosystem, where it runs as a self hosted web application. The project describes itself as a few dependency, hand written application that can be installed quickly and used to ingest product events through API calls.
read the full Tirreno overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is suricata or Tirreno more popular?
suricata has 6,652 GitHub stars and Tirreno has 1,518. suricata has the larger community by that measure.
Are suricata and Tirreno free?
Both are open source. suricata is licensed under GPL-2.0 and Tirreno under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between suricata and Tirreno?
suricata is written in C and Tirreno in PHP. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, suricata or Tirreno?
Choose suricata if you want the larger community (6,652 stars) or its GPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose Tirreno if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.