head to head · open source
glance vs writefreely
glance has 37,086 GitHub stars, 1,463 forks, 318 open issues and last shipped 13 days ago. writefreely has 5,250 stars, 398 forks, 108 open issues and last shipped 14 days ago. glance leads on adoption by 606% (37,086 vs 5,250 stars). glance is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; writefreely is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. glance has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, writefreely 8%. glance was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (go), 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 | writefreely | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 37K | ★ 5.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-05 | 2026-09-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 398 |
| 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 writefreely if
- You want the writefreely 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 writefreely 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 writefreely
WriteFreely is a clean, minimalist publishing platform made for writers, released under the AGPL 3.0 license and written in Go. It belongs to the fediverse: an ecosystem of federated publishing and social software that speaks ActivityPub, the same protocol used by Plume and other ActivityPub powered applications. An instance can be a single writer's blog, a shared internal knowledge base inside an organization, or a community built around the shared act of writing.
read the full writefreely overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is glance or writefreely more popular?
glance has 37,086 GitHub stars and writefreely has 5,250. glance has the larger community by that measure.
Are glance and writefreely free?
Both are open source. glance is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and writefreely under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between glance and writefreely?
glance is written in Go and writefreely 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, glance or writefreely?
Choose glance if you want the larger community (37,086 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose writefreely if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.