head to head · open source
Mastodon vs maigret
Mastodon has 50,465 GitHub stars, 7,536 forks, 4,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. maigret has 39,620 stars, 3,150 forks, 62 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Mastodon leads on adoption by 27% (50,465 vs 39,620 stars). Mastodon is written in Ruby under AGPL-3.0; maigret is written in Python under MIT. Mastodon has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, maigret 8%. maigret 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
| Mastodon | maigret | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 40K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.5K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Mastodon if
- You weight community size — 50K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick maigret if
- You want the maigret feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and maigret fits your workflow better
About Mastodon
[!NOTE] Want to learn more about Mastodon? Click below to find out more in a video. Mastodon is a free, open source social network server based on ActivityPub where users can follow friends and discover new ones. On Mastodon, users can publish anything they want: links, pictures, text, and video. All Mastodon servers are interoperable as a federated network (users on one server can seamlessly communicate with users from another one, including non Mastodon software that implements ActivityPub!) Navigation Project homepage 🐘 Donate to support development 🎁 View sponsors Blog 📰 Documentation 📚 Official…
read the full Mastodon overview →
About maigret
Maigret English · 简体中文 Maigret collects a dossier on a person by username only , checking for accounts on a huge number of sites and gathering all the available information from web pages. No API keys required. AI profiling (demo) . Sponsors RapidProxy provides high performance residential proxies for Twitter scraping, Selenium automation, and web data extraction. 90M+ IPs • Smart rotation • Anti block • Non expiring traffic. Special Offer : Try it free — Plans from $0.65/GB. Use code RAPID10 for 10% off. MangoProxy is a Residential, ISP, Mobile and Datacenter proxy service designed for professional tasks where…
read the full maigret overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Mastodon or maigret more popular?
Mastodon has 50,465 GitHub stars and maigret has 39,620. Mastodon has the larger community by that measure.
Are Mastodon and maigret free?
Both are open source. Mastodon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and maigret under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Mastodon and maigret?
Mastodon is written in Ruby and maigret in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Mastodon or maigret?
Choose Mastodon if you want the larger community (50,465 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose maigret if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.