head to head · open source
mocha vs thorium
mocha has 22,912 GitHub stars, 3,144 forks, 222 open issues and last shipped yesterday. thorium has 7,620 stars, 297 forks, 140 open issues and last shipped 23 days ago. mocha leads on adoption by 201% (22,912 vs 7,620 stars). mocha is written in JavaScript under MIT; thorium is written in C++ under BSD-3-Clause. mocha has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, thorium 4%. mocha 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| mocha | thorium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 7.6K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | JavaScript | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 297 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick mocha if
- You weight community size — 23K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick thorium if
- You want the thorium feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and thorium fits your workflow better
About mocha
☕️ Classic, reliable, trusted test framework for Node.js and the browser ☕️ Links Documentation Release Notes / History / Changes Code of Conduct Contributing Development Discord (ask questions here!) Issue Tracker Backers Become a backer and show your support to our open source project on our site. Sponsors Does your company use Mocha? Ask your manager or marketing team if your company would be interested in supporting our project. Support will allow the maintainers to dedicate more time for maintenance and new features for everyone. Also, your company's logo will show on GitHub and on our site who doesn't want…
read the full mocha overview →
About thorium
Thorium Chromium fork for linux named after radioactive element No. 90. Windows/MacOS/RasPi/Android/Other builds see below. Always built with the latest LTS version of Chromium. Intended to behave like and have the featureset of Google Chrome, with differences/patches/enhancements listed below. Compiler optimizations such as LTO, CFlag, LDFlag, LLVM Loop, and PGO, to make it FAST. :boom: In addition, we release builds tailored to different CPUs with different SIMD instructions, for even more execution speed. We offer SSE3, SSE4, AVX, and AVX2 builds, named as such in the Releases. If you are unsure which one to…
read the full thorium overview →
More in Productivity & Utilities
Related comparisons
More Browsers & Extensions projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Browsers & Extensions field.
Frequently asked questions
Is mocha or thorium more popular?
mocha has 22,912 GitHub stars and thorium has 7,620. mocha has the larger community by that measure.
Are mocha and thorium free?
Both are open source. mocha is licensed under MIT and thorium under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between mocha and thorium?
mocha is written in JavaScript and thorium in C++. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, mocha or thorium?
Choose mocha if you want the larger community (22,912 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose thorium if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.