head to head · open source
Ladybird vs thorium
Ladybird has 66,807 GitHub stars, 3,194 forks, 535 open issues and last shipped yesterday. thorium has 7,620 stars, 297 forks, 140 open issues and last shipped 23 days ago. Ladybird leads on adoption by 777% (66,807 vs 7,620 stars). Ladybird is written in C++ under BSD-2-Clause; thorium is written in C++ under BSD-3-Clause. Ladybird has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, thorium 4%. Ladybird 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
| Ladybird | thorium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 7.6K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | C++ | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 297 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ladybird if
- You weight community size — 67K 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 thorium if
- You want the thorium feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and thorium fits your workflow better
About Ladybird
Ladybird Ladybird is a truly independent web browser, using a novel engine based on web standards. [!IMPORTANT] Ladybird is in a pre alpha state, and only suitable for use by developers Features We aim to build a complete, usable browser for the modern web. Ladybird uses a multi process architecture with a main UI process, several WebContent renderer processes, an ImageDecoder process, and a RequestServer process. Image decoding and network connections are done out of process to be more robust against malicious content. Each tab has its own renderer process, which is sandboxed from the rest of the system. At the…
read the full Ladybird overview →
About thorium
Thorium Chromium fork for linux named after radioactive element No. 90. Windows/MacOS/RasPi/Android/Other builds see below. Always built with the latest LTS version of Chromium. Intended to behave like and have the featureset of Google Chrome, with differences/patches/enhancements listed below. Compiler optimizations such as LTO, CFlag, LDFlag, LLVM Loop, and PGO, to make it FAST. :boom: In addition, we release builds tailored to different CPUs with different SIMD instructions, for even more execution speed. We offer SSE3, SSE4, AVX, and AVX2 builds, named as such in the Releases. If you are unsure which one to…
read the full thorium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ladybird or thorium more popular?
Ladybird has 66,807 GitHub stars and thorium has 7,620. Ladybird has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ladybird and thorium free?
Both are open source. Ladybird is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and thorium under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ladybird and thorium?
Ladybird is written in C++ and thorium in C++. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Ladybird or thorium?
Choose Ladybird if you want the larger community (66,807 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose thorium if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.