head to head · open source
Ladybird vs turndown
Ladybird has 66,807 GitHub stars, 3,194 forks, 535 open issues and last shipped yesterday. turndown has 11,501 stars, 999 forks, 144 open issues and last shipped 16 days ago. Ladybird leads on adoption by 481% (66,807 vs 11,501 stars). Ladybird is written in C++ under BSD-2-Clause; turndown is written in HTML under MIT. Ladybird has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, turndown 9%. Ladybird was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (browser), 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
| Ladybird | turndown | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 67K | ★ 12K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C++ | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 999 |
| 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 turndown if
- You want the turndown feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and turndown 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 turndown
Turndown Convert HTML into Markdown with JavaScript. See it in action online. Project Updates to markdown has been renamed to Turndown. See the migration guide for details. Turndown repository has changed its URL to Installation npm: Browser: For usage with RequireJS, UMD versions are located in lib/turndown.umd.js (for Node.js) and lib/turndown.browser.umd.js for browser usage. These files are generated when the npm package is published. To generate them manually, clone this repo and run npm run build . Usage Turndown also accepts DOM nodes as input (either element nodes, document nodes, or document fragment…
read the full turndown overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ladybird or turndown more popular?
Ladybird has 66,807 GitHub stars and turndown has 11,501. Ladybird has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ladybird and turndown free?
Both are open source. Ladybird is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and turndown under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ladybird and turndown?
Ladybird is written in C++ and turndown in HTML. 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 turndown?
Choose Ladybird if you want the larger community (66,807 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose turndown if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.