head to head · open source
Avalonia vs obscura
Avalonia has 31,747 GitHub stars, 2,877 forks, 1,875 open issues and last shipped yesterday. obscura has 30,141 stars, 2,279 forks, 134 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Avalonia leads on adoption by 5% (31,747 vs 30,141 stars). Avalonia is written in C# under MIT; obscura is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Avalonia has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, obscura 8%. Avalonia was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (browser), 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
| Avalonia | obscura | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 30K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C# | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Avalonia if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick obscura if
- You want the obscura feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and obscura fits your workflow better
About Avalonia
📖 About Avalonia is a cross platform UI framework for dotnet, providing a flexible styling system and supporting a wide range of platforms such as Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and WebAssembly. Avalonia is mature and production ready and is used by companies, including Schneider Electric, Unity, JetBrains and GitHub. Considered by many to be the spiritual successor to WPF, Avalonia UI provides a familiar, modern development experience for XAML developers creating cross platform applications. While Avalonia UI is similar to WPF, it isn't a 1:1 copy, and you'll find plenty of improvements. For those seeking…
read the full Avalonia overview →
About obscura
Obscura The open source headless browser for AI agents and web scraping. Lightweight, stealthy, and built in Rust. Native rendering is here. No Chromium required. 🎉 Capture screenshots, screencast live pages, and export PDFs directly with Obscura. Obscura is a headless browser engine written in Rust, built for web scraping and AI agent automation. It runs real JavaScript via V8, supports the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and acts as a drop in replacement for headless Chrome with Puppeteer and Playwright. Why Obscura over headless Chrome? Obscura inspired Cloudflare Kitesurf’s first prototype Cloudflare began by…
read the full obscura overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Avalonia or obscura more popular?
Avalonia has 31,747 GitHub stars and obscura has 30,141. Avalonia has the larger community by that measure.
Are Avalonia and obscura free?
Both are open source. Avalonia is licensed under MIT and obscura under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Avalonia and obscura?
Avalonia is written in C# and obscura in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Avalonia or obscura?
Choose Avalonia if you want the larger community (31,747 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose obscura if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.