gobetween vs River
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted reverse proxy & gateways options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | gobetween | River |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Read-the-docs project |
| Health score | 37 · At risk | 17 · At risk |
| Category | Reverse Proxy & Gateways | Reverse Proxy & Gateways |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Go | Rust |
| Setup difficulty | Easy | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 64 MB | 64 MB |
| Deployment | docker, binary | binary, source |
| GitHub stars | ★ 1,988 | ★ 2,353 |
| First released | 2016 | 2024 |
| Replaces | HAProxy, NGINX Plus | nginx, HAProxy |
What are gobetween and River?
gobetween
gobetween is a free, lightweight L4 load balancer and reverse proxy supporting TCP and UDP with multiple discovery and health-check backends. It is designed for simple, fast traffic distribution.
- TCP and UDP balancing
- Service discovery
- Health checks
- REST API
River
River is a reverse-proxy application built on Cloudflare's Pingora engine, providing a configurable binary for HTTP proxying and load balancing. It is self-hosted and configured through files.
- Pingora-based
- Load balancing
- File-driven config
- Memory-safe Rust
gobetween vs River: key differences
Gobetween is written in Go, while River is built with Rust. Licensing differs — MIT for gobetween versus Apache-2.0 for River. Gobetween is the more established project (first released 2016), while River arrived in 2024. Gobetween lists first-class Docker deployment; River does not.
Why pick each one
Choose gobetween if…
- Single small binary
- Easy to configure
Watch out for
- L4 only
- Smaller community
Choose River if…
- Released under the Apache-2.0 license
- Active community (2.4k GitHub stars)
- Written in Rust
- Tiny footprint — runs in 64 MB RAM
Frequently asked questions
Is gobetween or River better?
Neither is universally better. River has the larger community, while gobetween is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are gobetween and River free and open-source?
Yes. gobetween is licensed under MIT and River under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run gobetween and River with Docker?
gobetween: yes. River: check the project docs for container support.