head to head · open source
thc-hydra vs cve
thc-hydra has 12,474 GitHub stars, 2,701 forks, 50 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. cve has 8,192 stars, 982 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 24 days ago. thc-hydra leads on adoption by 52% (12,474 vs 8,192 stars). thc-hydra is written in C under AGPL-3.0; cve is written in HTML under MIT. thc-hydra has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, cve 12%. thc-hydra was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (penetration-testing), 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
| thc-hydra | cve | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 12K | ★ 8.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | C | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-11-07 | 2026-10-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.7K | ⑂ 982 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick thc-hydra if
- You weight community size — 12K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cve if
- You want the cve feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and cve fits your workflow better
About thc-hydra
H Y D R A (c) 2001 2023 by van Hauser / THC Many modules were written by David (dot) Maciejak @ gmail (dot) com BFG code by Jan Dlabal Licensed under AGPLv3 (see LICENSE file) Please do not use in military or secret service organizations, or for illegal purposes. (This is the wish of the author and non binding. Many people working in these organizations do not care for laws and ethics anyway. You are not one of the "good" ones if you ignore this.) NOTE: No, this is not meant to be a markdown doc! old school! Hydra in the most current GitHub state can be directly downloaded via Docker: INTRODUCTION Number one of…
read the full thc-hydra overview →
About cve
CVE PoC Almost every publicly available CVE PoC. Current hottest CVEs To see the complete history go here How it works Trickest Workflow Architecture TB; DZ (Too big; didn't zoom): Collect CVE details from cvelist (Shout out to CVE Project!) Split CVEs up by year. Find PoCs for each CVE using 2 techniques: 1. References Gather each CVE's References . Check if any of them points to a PoC using ffuf and a list of keywords Regex: (Thanks @joohoi!) Note : ffuf is awesome for more purposes than just content discovery. Get CVE referenced in HackerOne Reports AllVideoPocsFromHackerOne (Thanks @zeroc00I!) 2. Github…
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Frequently asked questions
Is thc-hydra or cve more popular?
thc-hydra has 12,474 GitHub stars and cve has 8,192. thc-hydra has the larger community by that measure.
Are thc-hydra and cve free?
Both are open source. thc-hydra is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and cve under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between thc-hydra and cve?
thc-hydra is written in C and cve in HTML. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, thc-hydra or cve?
Choose thc-hydra if you want the larger community (12,474 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose cve if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.