head to head · open source
zinx vs pitaya
zinx has 7,765 GitHub stars, 1,262 forks, 96 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. pitaya has 2,829 stars, 545 forks, 69 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. zinx leads on adoption by 174% (7,765 vs 2,829 stars). zinx is written in Go under MIT; pitaya is written in Go under MIT. zinx has attracted 16% as many forks as stars, pitaya 19%. pitaya was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (game-server), 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 | pitaya | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 7.8K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-06-06 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 545 |
| 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 pitaya if
- You want the pitaya feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and pitaya 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 pitaya
Pitaya is an open source, MIT licensed game server framework written in Go that provides clustering support and client libraries for iOS, Android, Unity and other platforms through a shared C SDK, aimed at teams building distributed multiplayer games and other server side applications.
read the full pitaya overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is zinx or pitaya more popular?
zinx has 7,765 GitHub stars and pitaya has 2,829. zinx has the larger community by that measure.
Are zinx and pitaya free?
Both are open source. zinx is licensed under MIT and pitaya under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between zinx and pitaya?
zinx is written in Go and pitaya 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 pitaya?
Choose zinx if you want the larger community (7,765 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pitaya if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.