head to head · open source
Mastodon vs omnom
Mastodon has 50,465 GitHub stars, 7,536 forks, 4,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. omnom has 666 stars, 42 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Mastodon leads on adoption by 7,477% (50,465 vs 666 stars). Mastodon is written in Ruby under AGPL-3.0; omnom is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Mastodon has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, omnom 6%. Mastodon was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (activitypub, fediverse), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Mastodon | omnom | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 666 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.5K | ⑂ 42 |
| 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 omnom if
- You want the omnom feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and omnom 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 omnom
Omnom A web content preservation service Bookmark with website snapshots Aggregate feeds Follow ActivityPub streams Check out our wiki for more information. Features Self hosted Bookmarking RSS reader Fediverse/ActivityPub support Websites are captured as your browser renders it saves the displayed content of dynamic pages as well Multiple snapshots of the same URL with resource summary and compare/diff views Web interface with multiuser support Locally saved multimedia content Flexible filtering by date, free text search in content, tags, users, domains, URLs, etc.. Documented API Browser addon Omnom browser…
read the full omnom overview →
More in Community & Social
Related comparisons
More Social Networking projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Social Networking field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Mastodon or omnom more popular?
Mastodon has 50,465 GitHub stars and omnom has 666. Mastodon has the larger community by that measure.
Are Mastodon and omnom free?
Both are open source. Mastodon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and omnom under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Mastodon and omnom?
Mastodon is written in Ruby and omnom in Go. 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 omnom?
Choose Mastodon if you want the larger community (50,465 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose omnom if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.