head to head · open source
monaco-editor vs luakit
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars, 4,167 forks, 859 open issues and last shipped yesterday. luakit has 2,322 stars, 256 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. monaco-editor leads on adoption by 1,922% (46,944 vs 2,322 stars). monaco-editor is written in JavaScript under MIT; luakit is written in Lua under GPL-3.0. monaco-editor has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, luakit 11%. monaco-editor 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
| monaco-editor | luakit | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 2.3K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Lua |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-06-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 256 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick monaco-editor if
- You weight community size — 47K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick luakit if
- You want the luakit feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Lua
- You evaluated both and luakit fits your workflow better
About monaco-editor
Monaco Editor The Monaco Editor is the fully featured code editor from VS Code. Check out the VS Code docs to see some of the supported features. Try it out Try out the editor and see various examples in our interactive playground. The playground is the best way to learn about how to use the editor, which features is supports, to try out different versions and to create minimal reproducible examples for bug reports. Installing You will get: inside /esm : ESM version of the editor (compatible with e.g. webpack) monaco.d.ts : this specifies the API of the editor (this is what is actually versioned, everything else…
read the full monaco-editor overview →
About luakit
Luakit luakit is a fast, light and simple to use micro browser framework extensible by Lua using the WebKit web content engine and the GTK+ toolkit. Don't Panic! You don't have to be a developer to use luakit on a daily basis. If you are familiar with quitebrowser, vim browser, jumanji or extensions like Vimium or cVim etc, you will find luakit behaves similarly out of the box. Requirements GTK+ 3 Lua 5.1 or LuaJIT 2 lfs (lua file system) webkit2gtk sqlite3 gstreamer (for video playback) lua socket (for gopher support) Installing Luakit is available on most Linux Distributions and BSD system via their package…
read the full luakit overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monaco-editor or luakit more popular?
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars and luakit has 2,322. monaco-editor has the larger community by that measure.
Are monaco-editor and luakit free?
Both are open source. monaco-editor is licensed under MIT and luakit under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monaco-editor and luakit?
monaco-editor is written in JavaScript and luakit in Lua. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, monaco-editor or luakit?
Choose monaco-editor if you want the larger community (46,944 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose luakit if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.