head to head · open source
misskey vs koala
misskey has 11,326 GitHub stars, 1,615 forks, 2,535 open issues and last shipped yesterday. koala has 3,568 stars, 456 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. misskey leads on adoption by 217% (11,326 vs 3,568 stars). misskey is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; koala is written in Ruby under MIT. misskey has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, koala 13%. misskey 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
| misskey | koala | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2025-10-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 456 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick misskey if
- You weight community size — 11K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- 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 misskey
Misskey is an open source, federated social media platform that is free forever, released under the AGPL 3.0 license. It is written in TypeScript and lives in the fediverse, the network of interoperable social platforms built on the ActivityPub protocol. The project has been developed for roughly ten years and carries the topics activitypub, federation, fediverse, microblog, and misskey. Its homepage and documentation hub is hosted at misskey hub.net.
read the full misskey overview →
About koala
Koala is a lightweight Ruby library for Facebook APIs. It supports the Graph API, the Marketing API, the Atlas API, realtime updates, test users, and OAuth validation. It lives in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails ecosystem and provides API accessors that return simple JSON responses.
read the full koala overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is misskey or koala more popular?
misskey has 11,326 GitHub stars and koala has 3,568. misskey has the larger community by that measure.
Are misskey and koala free?
Both are open source. misskey is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and koala under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between misskey and koala?
misskey is written in TypeScript 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, misskey or koala?
Choose misskey if you want the larger community (11,326 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose koala if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.