head to head · open source
vuls vs cve
vuls has 12,267 GitHub stars, 1,245 forks, 92 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cve has 8,087 stars, 977 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. vuls leads on adoption by 52% (12,267 vs 8,087 stars). vuls is written in Go under GPL-3.0; cve is written in HTML under MIT. vuls has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, cve 12%. vuls was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (security, security-tools), 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
| vuls | cve | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 12K | ★ 8.1K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-09-24 | 2026-09-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 977 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick vuls if
- You weight community size — 12K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 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.
About cve
cve is an automatically generated, MIT licensed repository from Trickest that gathers almost every publicly available CVE Proof of Concept and publishes it as browsable markdown files, made for penetration testers, red teams and vulnerability researchers who need to find public exploits for a given identifier.
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Frequently asked questions
Is vuls or cve more popular?
vuls has 12,267 GitHub stars and cve has 8,087. vuls has the larger community by that measure.
Are vuls and cve free?
Both are open source. vuls is licensed under GPL-3.0 and cve under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between vuls and cve?
vuls is written in Go 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, vuls or cve?
Choose vuls if you want the larger community (12,267 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose cve if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.