head to head · open source
glance vs koala
glance has 37,981 GitHub stars, 1,506 forks, 318 open issues and last shipped yesterday. koala has 3,574 stars, 456 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. glance leads on adoption by 963% (37,981 vs 3,574 stars). glance is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; koala is written in Ruby under MIT. glance has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, koala 13%. glance was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | koala | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 38K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 456 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick glance if
- You weight community size — 38K 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 koala if
- You want the koala feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and koala fits your workflow better
About glance
Glance Install • Configuration • Discord • Sponsor Community widgets • Preconfigured pages • Themes A lightweight, highly customizable dashboard that displays your feeds in a beautiful, streamlined interface Features Various widgets RSS feeds Subreddit posts Hacker News posts Weather forecasts YouTube channel uploads Twitch channels Market prices Docker containers status Server stats Custom widgets and many more... Fast and lightweight Low memory usage Few dependencies Minimal vanilla JS Single Configuration Configuration is done through YAML files, to learn more about how the layout works, how to add more pages…
read the full glance overview →
About koala
Koala ==== Koala is a Facebook library for Ruby, supporting the Graph API (including the batch requests and photo uploads), the Marketing API, the Atlas API, realtime updates, test users, and OAuth validation. We wrote Koala with four goals: Lightweight: Koala should be as light and simple as Facebook’s own libraries, providing API accessors and returning simple JSON. Fast: Koala should, out of the box, be quick. Out of the box, we use Facebook's faster read only servers when possible and if available, the Typhoeus gem to make snappy Facebook requests. Of course, that brings us to our next topic: Flexible: Koala…
read the full koala overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is glance or koala more popular?
glance has 37,981 GitHub stars and koala has 3,574. glance has the larger community by that measure.
Are glance and koala free?
Both are open source. glance is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and koala under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between glance and koala?
glance is written in Go and koala 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 koala?
Choose glance if you want the larger community (37,981 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose koala if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.