head to head · open source
zinx vs goworld
zinx has 7,765 GitHub stars, 1,262 forks, 96 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. goworld has 2,718 stars, 474 forks, 27 open issues and last shipped 10 months ago. zinx leads on adoption by 186% (7,765 vs 2,718 stars). zinx is written in Go under MIT; goworld is written in Go under Apache-2.0. zinx has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, goworld 17%. zinx was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (game-server, golang), 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
| zinx | goworld | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 7.8K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-06-06 | 2025-11-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 474 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick zinx if
- You weight community size — 7.8K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick goworld if
- You want the goworld feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and goworld fits your workflow better
About zinx
Zinx is a lightweight concurrent server framework written in Go, aimed at developers who want a small, readable TCP server skeleton they can study and customise rather than adopt a large opaque application framework.
About goworld
GoWorld is an Apache 2.0 licensed, scalable distributed game server engine written in Go, with hot swapping of game logic, aimed at developers and studios that run persistent multiplayer game worlds.
read the full goworld overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is zinx or goworld more popular?
zinx has 7,765 GitHub stars and goworld has 2,718. zinx has the larger community by that measure.
Are zinx and goworld free?
Both are open source. zinx is licensed under MIT and goworld under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between zinx and goworld?
zinx is written in Go and goworld 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, zinx or goworld?
Choose zinx if you want the larger community (7,765 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose goworld if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.