head to head · open source
UnKey vs Keyshade
UnKey has 5,438 GitHub stars, 636 forks, 163 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Keyshade has 768 stars, 263 forks, 78 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. UnKey leads on adoption by 608% (5,438 vs 768 stars). UnKey is written in Go under a custom or non-standard licence; Keyshade is written in TypeScript under MPL-2.0. UnKey has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, Keyshade 34%. UnKey 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
| UnKey | Keyshade | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 5.4K | ★ 768 |
| License | Custom / other | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-04-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 636 | ⑂ 263 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick UnKey if
- You weight community size — 5.4K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Keyshade if
- You want the Keyshade feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Keyshade fits your workflow better
About UnKey
Unkey is a developer platform for modern APIs, written in Go and published as a source available repository on GitHub. It brings several pieces of API infrastructure into one place: instant API deployment, globally distributed gateways that route and authenticate traffic, API key issuance and verification, ratelimiting, permissions and role based access control, usage analytics, and audit logs. The project describes itself as unifying infrastructure so that teams can ship faster, and it lives in the security and privacy space, specifically secrets management and API key management, alongside the broader API gatew…
read the full UnKey overview →
About Keyshade
Keyshade is an open source secret and configuration management tool that encrypts secrets with public key cryptography and pushes them to application runtimes in real time, built in TypeScript for teams that currently keep configuration in a cloud provider's dashboard.
read the full Keyshade overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is UnKey or Keyshade more popular?
UnKey has 5,438 GitHub stars and Keyshade has 768. UnKey has the larger community by that measure.
Are UnKey and Keyshade free?
Both are open source. UnKey has no licence declared in this registry, and Keyshade is licensed under MPL-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between UnKey and Keyshade?
UnKey is written in Go and Keyshade in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, UnKey or Keyshade?
Choose UnKey if you want the larger community (5,438 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Keyshade if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.