head to head · open source
Mastodon vs koala
Mastodon has 50,465 GitHub stars, 7,536 forks, 4,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. koala has 3,574 stars, 456 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. Mastodon leads on adoption by 1,312% (50,465 vs 3,574 stars). Mastodon is written in Ruby under AGPL-3.0; koala is written in Ruby under MIT. Mastodon has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, koala 13%. Mastodon was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (social-network), 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
| Mastodon | koala | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.5K | ⑂ 456 |
| 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 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 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 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 Mastodon or koala more popular?
Mastodon has 50,465 GitHub stars and koala has 3,574. Mastodon has the larger community by that measure.
Are Mastodon and koala free?
Both are open source. Mastodon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and koala under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Mastodon and koala?
Mastodon is written in Ruby 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, Mastodon or koala?
Choose Mastodon if you want the larger community (50,465 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose koala if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.