head to head · open source
crowdsec vs vuls
crowdsec has 14,956 GitHub stars, 719 forks, 296 open issues and last shipped yesterday. vuls has 12,268 stars, 1,244 forks, 92 open issues and last shipped today. crowdsec leads on adoption by 22% (14,956 vs 12,268 stars). crowdsec is written in Go under MIT; vuls is written in Go under GPL-3.0. crowdsec has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, vuls 10%. vuls was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cybersecurity), 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
| crowdsec | vuls | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 15K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-24 | 2026-09-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 719 | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick crowdsec if
- You weight community size — 15K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick vuls if
- You want the vuls feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and vuls fits your workflow better
About crowdsec
CrowdSec is an open source, MIT licensed intrusion detection and prevention system, WAF and bot detection engine that analyses logs and HTTP requests and blocks malicious IPs at the firewall, reverse proxy or CDN, built for Linux, Windows, Docker and Kubernetes operators who want community sourced threat intelligence sitting behind their own infrastructure.
read the full crowdsec overview →
About vuls
Vuls is an agent less vulnerability scanner written in Go and licensed under GPL 3.0, aimed at system administrators and security teams that must find and track known vulnerabilities across Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and macOS hosts, containers, WordPress installs, programming language libraries and network devices without installing an agent on every machine.
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Frequently asked questions
Is crowdsec or vuls more popular?
crowdsec has 14,956 GitHub stars and vuls has 12,268. crowdsec has the larger community by that measure.
Are crowdsec and vuls free?
Both are open source. crowdsec is licensed under MIT and vuls under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crowdsec and vuls?
crowdsec is written in Go and vuls 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, crowdsec or vuls?
Choose crowdsec if you want the larger community (14,956 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose vuls if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.