head to head · open source
glance vs social
glance has 37,149 GitHub stars, 1,464 forks, 318 open issues and last shipped 17 days ago. social has 503 stars, 59 forks, 24 open issues and last shipped yesterday. glance leads on adoption by 7,285% (37,149 vs 503 stars). glance is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; social is written in PHP under AGPL-3.0. glance has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, social 12%. social 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 | social | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 37K | ★ 503 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-05 | 2026-09-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 59 |
| 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 social if
- You want the social feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and social 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 social
Nextcloud Social is an AGPL 3.0 Nextcloud app that turns an existing Nextcloud instance into a Fediverse server, giving every user a @[email protected] identity that people on Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, GoToSocial and Akkoma can follow, mention and reply to.
read the full social overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is glance or social more popular?
glance has 37,149 GitHub stars and social has 503. glance has the larger community by that measure.
Are glance and social free?
Both are open source. glance is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and social under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between glance and social?
glance is written in Go and social in PHP. 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 social?
Choose glance if you want the larger community (37,149 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose social if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.