head to head · open source
Brave vs thorium
Brave has 24,079 GitHub stars, 3,263 forks, 10,752 open issues and last shipped yesterday. thorium has 7,620 stars, 297 forks, 140 open issues and last shipped 23 days ago. Brave leads on adoption by 216% (24,079 vs 7,620 stars). Brave is written in various languages under MPL-2.0; thorium is written in C++ under BSD-3-Clause. Brave has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, thorium 4%. Brave was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (chromium), 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
| Brave | thorium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 24K | ★ 7.6K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | — | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 297 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Brave if
- You weight community size — 24K stars and counting
- You want the MPL-2.0 license terms
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick thorium if
- You want the thorium feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and thorium fits your workflow better
About Brave
Brave Browser This repository is not needed for building the browser and only holds issues, releases and the wiki. The source code and contributions are at You can visit our website to get the latest stable release. Resources Issues: Bug reports and feature requests for the Brave Browser. Releases: Releases of Brave Browser hosted on GitHub. See Brave Release Schedule for more information. Wiki: Documentation for developers, administrators, and power users. User facing documentation is available at the Brave help center. Documentation and guides: Additional technical information, primarily for developers…
read the full Brave overview →
About thorium
Thorium Chromium fork for linux named after radioactive element No. 90. Windows/MacOS/RasPi/Android/Other builds see below. Always built with the latest LTS version of Chromium. Intended to behave like and have the featureset of Google Chrome, with differences/patches/enhancements listed below. Compiler optimizations such as LTO, CFlag, LDFlag, LLVM Loop, and PGO, to make it FAST. :boom: In addition, we release builds tailored to different CPUs with different SIMD instructions, for even more execution speed. We offer SSE3, SSE4, AVX, and AVX2 builds, named as such in the Releases. If you are unsure which one to…
read the full thorium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Brave or thorium more popular?
Brave has 24,079 GitHub stars and thorium has 7,620. Brave has the larger community by that measure.
Are Brave and thorium free?
Both are open source. Brave is licensed under MPL-2.0 and thorium under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Brave and thorium?
Brave is written in various languages and thorium in C++. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Brave or thorium?
Choose Brave if you want the larger community (24,079 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose thorium if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.