head to head · open source
glance vs haven
glance has 37,086 GitHub stars, 1,463 forks, 318 open issues and last shipped 13 days ago. haven has 803 stars, 48 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped yesterday. glance leads on adoption by 4,518% (37,086 vs 803 stars). glance is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; haven is written in Ruby under MIT. glance has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, haven 6%. haven was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (self-hosted), 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
| glance | haven | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 37K | ★ 803 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-05 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 48 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick glance if
- You weight community size — 37K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick haven if
- You want the haven feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and haven fits your workflow better
About glance
Glance is a self hosted dashboard application written in Go and released under the AGPL 3.0 license. It gathers feeds and status information from many sources into a single customizable page, so that a user can read news, follow channels and watch server health from one interface instead of opening a separate tab or application for each source. It lives in the self hosted and homelab ecosystem, alongside other Docker packaged services that users run on their own hardware. The project has been on GitHub for about two years, holds roughly 37,000 stars and 1,454 forks, and its topic list places it among aggregators,…
read the full glance overview →
About haven
Haven is a self hostable, MIT licensed private blogging application built with Ruby on Rails, made for people who want to write for a known circle of friends and family rather than publish to the open web.
read the full haven overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is glance or haven more popular?
glance has 37,086 GitHub stars and haven has 803. glance has the larger community by that measure.
Are glance and haven free?
Both are open source. glance is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and haven under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between glance and haven?
glance is written in Go and haven in Ruby. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, glance or haven?
Choose glance if you want the larger community (37,086 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose haven if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.