head to head · open source
Mastodon vs glance
Mastodon has 50,299 GitHub stars, 7,498 forks, 4,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. glance has 37,086 stars, 1,463 forks, 318 open issues and last shipped 13 days ago. Mastodon leads on adoption by 36% (50,299 vs 37,086 stars). Mastodon is written in Ruby under AGPL-3.0; glance is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Mastodon has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, glance 4%. Mastodon was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (docker), 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
| Mastodon | glance | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 37K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.5K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Mastodon if
- You weight community size — 50K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick glance if
- You want the glance feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and glance fits your workflow better
About Mastodon
Mastodon is a free, open source, self hosted social network server built on ActivityPub that lets anyone run a microblogging community which interoperates with the wider Fediverse, and it is aimed at individuals, communities, and organisations that want to own their social graph instead of renting it from a platform.
read the full Mastodon overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Mastodon or glance more popular?
Mastodon has 50,299 GitHub stars and glance has 37,086. Mastodon has the larger community by that measure.
Are Mastodon and glance free?
Both are open source. Mastodon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and glance under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Mastodon and glance?
Mastodon is written in Ruby and glance 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, Mastodon or glance?
Choose Mastodon if you want the larger community (50,299 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose glance if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.