Blockchain

4 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars. Scroll down for our analysis.

Tool	Stars	Velocity	Language	License	Score
Foundry Blazing fast Ethereum dev toolkit	10.3k	+11/wk	Rust	Apache License 2.0	85
Hardhat Ethereum development environment	8.5k	-	TypeScript	MIT License	79
ord 👁‍🗨 Rare and exotic sats	4.0k	-	Rust	-	63
web3.swift	715	-	Swift	MIT	61

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Our Analysis

Foundry10.3k★

Foundry is a Rust-based smart contract development toolkit that replaced Hardhat for a lot of Solidity developers who wanted faster testing and native Solidity scripting. Write your tests in Solidity instead of JavaScript, and they run orders of magnitude faster. Apache 2.0. Four CLI tools: forge (build/test), cast (interact with contracts), anvil (local testnet), and chisel (Solidity REPL). The testing framework supports fuzz testing, invariant testing, and gas snapshots natively. Fully free. No paid tier, no hosted version. Install the CLI and go. The speed difference over Hardhat is not marginal; it's dramatic. Test suites that took minutes run in seconds. The Solidity-native testing means no context-switching between Solidity and JavaScript. Solo through large teams: free, no restrictions. The tooling is mature enough for production use at every scale. The catch: Foundry's Solidity-only testing means you lose access to Hardhat's JavaScript plugin ecosystem. If you need complex deployment scripts with off-chain logic, Hardhat's JavaScript flexibility is easier. The learning curve from Hardhat to Foundry is real: different testing patterns, different project structure. And if you're not in the EVM ecosystem, this is irrelevant.

Hardhat8.5k★

Hardhat is the standard Ethereum development environment that most Solidity developers reach for: a local testing chain, a compiler, a debugger, and a plugin ecosystem. It's the Node.js of blockchain development: a local testing chain, a compiler, a debugger, and a deployment pipeline all in one. Everything is free and open source. No paid tier, no cloud service, no premium plugins. The core team (Nomic Foundation) is funded by the Ethereum Foundation, not by charging developers. MIT-like license on most components. There's nothing to host. Hardhat runs locally as a Node.js package. `npx hardhat` gets you a project scaffold, a local Ethereum network for testing, and a compilation pipeline. It integrates with ethers.js, Viem, and every major Ethereum library. Solo developers: this is your starting point for Solidity development. The local network and console.log in Solidity (yes, really) make debugging so much faster than the alternatives. Small teams: Hardhat's plugin system lets you add gas reporting, contract verification, and coverage analysis. Larger teams: the Hardhat Ignition deployment system handles multi-step contract deployments across networks. The catch: Hardhat is Ethereum-specific. If you're building on Solana, Cosmos, or other chains, this isn't for you. And compilation speed on large projects can be slow. Foundry (written in Rust) compiles significantly faster.

ord4.0k★

Ord is the reference implementation for Bitcoin Ordinals, the protocol that lets you inscribe data directly onto individual satoshis. The package includes a CLI wallet, a block explorer, and indexing tools. Fully free, open source, and community-funded. Running ord requires a fully synced Bitcoin Core node with transaction indexing enabled: 1TB+ disk and days of initial sync. The CLI manages inscriptions and wallet operations. It processes every block as they come in, so you are committing to ongoing maintenance, not a set-it-and-forget-it setup. Bitcoin developers and anyone building on the Ordinals protocol need this. There is no real alternative because this is the reference implementation. If you are not specifically building on Bitcoin Ordinals, this is not relevant to you. Niche but exactly right for that niche. The catch: the block explorer renders untrusted HTML and JavaScript from inscriptions. The team warns about this explicitly. Host it with access controls, not publicly open.

web3.swift715★

Web3.swift is the Swift library that handles that. It's the Swift equivalent of web3.js or ethers.js. MIT license. Provides typed Ethereum JSON-RPC calls, ABI encoding/decoding, contract interaction, and transaction signing from native Swift code. Works with any Ethereum node or provider (Infura, Alchemy, etc.). Fully free. Client library. Install via Swift Package Manager and use. No hosting, no paid tier. The catch: this library is effectively in maintenance mode with no recent activity. The Ethereum ecosystem moves fast (new EIPs, new standards, chain upgrades), and a dormant library risks falling behind. Check the last commit date before depending on this for production. If you need active development and broader chain support, consider using ethers.js via a JavaScript bridge or look at alternative Swift Ethereum libraries. The Swift blockchain development community is small, and your options are limited.