head to head · open source
NvChad vs devpod
NvChad has 28,530 GitHub stars, 2,212 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. devpod has 15,307 stars, 589 forks, 58 open issues and last shipped 12 months ago. NvChad leads on adoption by 86% (28,530 vs 15,307 stars). NvChad is written in Lua under GPL-3.0; devpod is written in Go under MPL-2.0. NvChad has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, devpod 4%. NvChad was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ide), 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
| NvChad | devpod | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 15K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-24 | 2025-11-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 589 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick NvChad if
- You weight community size — 29K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Lua
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick devpod if
- You want the devpod feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and devpod fits your workflow better
About NvChad
NvChad Home • Install • Contribute • Support • Features Showcase What is it? NvChad is a neovim config written in lua aiming to provide a base configuration with very beautiful UI and blazing fast startuptime (around 0.02 secs 0.07 secs). We tweak UI plugins such as telescope, nvim tree etc well to provide an aesthetic UI experience. Lazy loading is done 93% of the time meaning that plugins will not be loaded by default, they will be loaded only when required also at specific commands, events etc. This lowers the startuptime and it was like 0.07 secs tested on an old pentium machine 1.4ghz + 4gb ram & HDD…
read the full NvChad overview →
About devpod
Website • Quickstart • Documentation • Blog • 𝕏 (Twitter) • Slack We are hiring! Come build the future of remote development environments with us. DevPod is a client only tool to create reproducible developer environments based on a devcontainer.json on any backend. Each developer environment runs in a container and is specified through a devcontainer.json. Through DevPod providers, these environments can be created on any backend, such as the local computer, a Kubernetes cluster, any reachable remote machine, or in a VM in the cloud. You can think of DevPod as the glue that connects your local IDE to a machine…
read the full devpod overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NvChad or devpod more popular?
NvChad has 28,530 GitHub stars and devpod has 15,307. NvChad has the larger community by that measure.
Are NvChad and devpod free?
Both are open source. NvChad is licensed under GPL-3.0 and devpod under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NvChad and devpod?
NvChad is written in Lua and devpod in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, NvChad or devpod?
Choose NvChad if you want the larger community (28,530 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose devpod if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.