head to head · open source
glance vs koala
glance has 37,086 GitHub stars, 1,463 forks, 318 open issues and last shipped 13 days ago. koala has 3,568 stars, 456 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. glance leads on adoption by 939% (37,086 vs 3,568 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 | ★ 37K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-05 | 2025-10-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 456 |
| 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 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 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 koala
Koala is a lightweight Ruby library for Facebook APIs. It supports the Graph API, the Marketing API, the Atlas API, realtime updates, test users, and OAuth validation. It lives in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails ecosystem and provides API accessors that return simple JSON responses.
read the full koala overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is glance or koala more popular?
glance has 37,086 GitHub stars and koala has 3,568. 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 (37,086 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose koala if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.