head to head · open source
ProjectDiscovery vs vuls
ProjectDiscovery has 32,543 GitHub stars, 3,962 forks, 107 open issues and last shipped yesterday. vuls has 12,325 stars, 1,247 forks, 92 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. ProjectDiscovery leads on adoption by 164% (32,543 vs 12,325 stars). ProjectDiscovery is written in Go under MIT; vuls is written in Go under GPL-3.0. ProjectDiscovery has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, vuls 10%. ProjectDiscovery 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-scanner), 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
| ProjectDiscovery | vuls | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 33K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.0K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick ProjectDiscovery if
- You weight community size — 33K 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 ProjectDiscovery
English • 中文 • Korean • Indonesia • Spanish • 日本語 • Portuguese • Türkçe Nuclei is a modern, high performance vulnerability scanner that leverages simple YAML based templates. It empowers you to design custom vulnerability detection scenarios that mimic real world conditions, leading to zero false positives. Simple YAML format for creating and customizing vulnerability templates. Contributed by thousands of security professionals to tackle trending vulnerabilities. Reduce false positives by simulating real world steps to verify a vulnerability. Ultra fast parallel scan processing and request clustering. Integrate…
read the full ProjectDiscovery overview →
About vuls
Vuls: VULnerability Scanner Vulnerability scanner for Linux/FreeBSD, agent less, written in Go. Twitter: @vuls en Abstract For a system administrator, having to perform security vulnerability analysis and software update on a daily basis can be a burden. To avoid downtime in a production environment, it is common for a system administrator to choose not to use the automatic update option provided by the package manager and to perform update manually. This leads to the following problems. The system administrator will have to constantly watch out for any new vulnerabilities in NVD (National Vulnerability…
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Frequently asked questions
Is ProjectDiscovery or vuls more popular?
ProjectDiscovery has 32,543 GitHub stars and vuls has 12,325. ProjectDiscovery has the larger community by that measure.
Are ProjectDiscovery and vuls free?
Both are open source. ProjectDiscovery is licensed under MIT and vuls under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ProjectDiscovery and vuls?
ProjectDiscovery 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, ProjectDiscovery or vuls?
Choose ProjectDiscovery if you want the larger community (32,543 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose vuls if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.