Beancount-gs vs Fava
Beancount-gs and Fava are both plain-text accounting software. Beancount-gs is open source under MIT, with 416 GitHub stars. Fava is open source under MIT, with 2.6k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Beancount-gs when
- A Chinese-speaking household or small group wants shared Beancount bookkeeping in the browser.
- Pick Fava when
- You keep double-entry books in Beancount and want reports and editing in a browser.
Side by side
A multi-user web service for Beancount books with a React frontend, Go API, GitHub sign-in, an AI bookkeeping assistant and MCP access.
A web interface for Beancount ledgers with balance sheets, income statements, charts, queries and an editor.
Version 2 is a major rewrite, docs are in Chinese, and it requires a GitHub OAuth app.
Only as useful as your Beancount file, and importing bank data is a separate job.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server
Self-hosted server and command line
Go, Gin, TypeScript, React and SQLite
Python, TypeScript, Svelte and Beancount
Open source, MIT (permissive) (both)
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice. (both)
416 GitHub stars
2.6k GitHub stars
Established: started 5 years ago, latest release v1.2.3.
Established: started 11 years ago, no tagged release yet.
Other comparisons
More plain-text accounting tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.