head to head · open source
Lemmy vs koala
Lemmy has 14,659 GitHub stars, 973 forks, 129 open issues and last shipped yesterday. koala has 3,574 stars, 456 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. Lemmy leads on adoption by 310% (14,659 vs 3,574 stars). Lemmy is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0; koala is written in Ruby under MIT. Lemmy has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, koala 13%. Lemmy 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
| Lemmy | koala | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 15K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 973 | ⑂ 456 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lemmy if
- You weight community size — 15K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick koala if
- You want the koala feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and koala fits your workflow better
About Lemmy
English Español Русский 汉语 漢語 日本語 Lemmy A link aggregator and forum for the fediverse. Join Lemmy · Documentation · Matrix Chat · Report Bug · Request Feature · Releases · Code of Conduct About The Project Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse. For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one…
read the full Lemmy overview →
About koala
Koala ==== Koala is a Facebook library for Ruby, supporting the Graph API (including the batch requests and photo uploads), the Marketing API, the Atlas API, realtime updates, test users, and OAuth validation. We wrote Koala with four goals: Lightweight: Koala should be as light and simple as Facebook’s own libraries, providing API accessors and returning simple JSON. Fast: Koala should, out of the box, be quick. Out of the box, we use Facebook's faster read only servers when possible and if available, the Typhoeus gem to make snappy Facebook requests. Of course, that brings us to our next topic: Flexible: Koala…
read the full koala overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lemmy or koala more popular?
Lemmy has 14,659 GitHub stars and koala has 3,574. Lemmy has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lemmy and koala free?
Both are open source. Lemmy is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and koala under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lemmy and koala?
Lemmy is written in Rust and koala in Ruby. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Lemmy or koala?
Choose Lemmy if you want the larger community (14,659 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose koala if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.