head to head · open source
Avalonia vs obscura
Avalonia has 31,517 GitHub stars, 2,826 forks, 1,875 open issues and last shipped yesterday. obscura has 27,331 stars, 2,005 forks, 134 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Avalonia leads on adoption by 15% (31,517 vs 27,331 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 7%. 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 | ★ 27K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C# | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.8K | ⑂ 2.0K |
| 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
Avalonia is a cross platform UI framework for .NET, written in C and driven by XAML. It provides a flexible styling system and targets a wide range of platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and WebAssembly. The project is mature and production ready, and it is used by companies such as Schneider Electric, Unity, JetBrains and GitHub. It lives in the .NET ecosystem and is distributed through the NuGet package manager.
read the full Avalonia overview →
About obscura
Obscura is an open source headless browser engine written in Rust, built for web scraping and AI agent automation. It runs real JavaScript through V8, speaks the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and presents itself as a drop in replacement for headless Chrome when driven by Puppeteer or Playwright. The project lives in the browser automation and headless browser corner of the Rust ecosystem, and it ships under the Apache 2.0 license.
read the full obscura overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Avalonia or obscura more popular?
Avalonia has 31,517 GitHub stars and obscura has 27,331. 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 (31,517 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose obscura if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.