head to head · open source
witr vs codeburn
witr has 22,374 GitHub stars, 781 forks, 17 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. codeburn has 11,063 stars, 839 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped yesterday. witr leads on adoption by 102% (22,374 vs 11,063 stars). witr is written in Go under Apache-2.0; codeburn is written in TypeScript under MIT. witr has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, codeburn 8%. codeburn was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cli), 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
| witr | codeburn | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 22K | ★ 11K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-08-15 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 781 | ⑂ 839 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick witr if
- You weight community size — 22K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick codeburn if
- You want the codeburn feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and codeburn fits your workflow better
About witr
witr is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed Go tool with both a command line interface and an interactive terminal UI that traces any process, port, container, or file back to the exact chain of systems that started it, and it is built for operators, SREs, and developers who need to answer "why is this running?" during debugging and incident response.
About codeburn
CodeBurn is a free, open source, local first tool that tracks AI coding token usage and cost across 41 tools and agents, including Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini, and Grok. It is written in TypeScript, licensed under MIT, and lives in the developer tools and observability ecosystem as a command line utility with optional desktop surfaces. Every surface reads the session files that the supported tools already write to disk, so CodeBurn acts as one source of truth rather than a separate collection layer.
read the full codeburn overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is witr or codeburn more popular?
witr has 22,374 GitHub stars and codeburn has 11,063. witr has the larger community by that measure.
Are witr and codeburn free?
Both are open source. witr is licensed under Apache-2.0 and codeburn under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between witr and codeburn?
witr is written in Go and codeburn 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, witr or codeburn?
Choose witr if you want the larger community (22,374 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose codeburn if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.