head to head · open source
serenity vs Harper
serenity has 33,938 GitHub stars, 3,488 forks, 739 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Harper has 17,365 stars, 794 forks, 896 open issues and last shipped yesterday. serenity leads on adoption by 95% (33,938 vs 17,365 stars). serenity is written in C++ under BSD-2-Clause; Harper is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. serenity has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, Harper 5%. Harper 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
| serenity | Harper | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 34K | ★ 17K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C++ | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 794 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick serenity if
- You weight community size — 34K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Harper if
- You want the Harper feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Harper fits your workflow better
About serenity
SerenityOS Graphical Unix like operating system for 64 bit x86, Arm, and RISC V computers. FAQ Documentation Build Instructions About SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems. Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late 1990s productivity software and the power user accessibility of late 2000s \ nix. This is a system by us, for us, based on the things we like. You can watch videos of the system being developed on YouTube: Andreas Kling's channel Linus Groh's…
read the full serenity overview →
About Harper
Harper Harper is an English grammar checker designed to be just right. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition. Grammarly was too expensive and too overbearing. Its suggestions lacked context, and were often just plain wrong . Not to mention: it's a privacy nightmare. Everything you write with Grammarly is sent to their servers. Their privacy policy claims they don't sell the data, but that doesn't mean they don't use it to train large language models and god knows what else. Not only that, but the round trip time of the network request makes revising your work all the more…
read the full Harper overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is serenity or Harper more popular?
serenity has 33,938 GitHub stars and Harper has 17,365. serenity has the larger community by that measure.
Are serenity and Harper free?
Both are open source. serenity is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and Harper under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between serenity and Harper?
serenity is written in C++ and Harper in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, serenity or Harper?
Choose serenity if you want the larger community (33,938 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose Harper if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.