head to head · open source
monaco-editor vs Mercury
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars, 4,167 forks, 859 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Mercury has 1,542 stars, 43 forks, 92 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. monaco-editor leads on adoption by 2,944% (46,944 vs 1,542 stars). monaco-editor is written in JavaScript under MIT; Mercury is written in JavaScript under MPL-2.0. monaco-editor has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, Mercury 3%. monaco-editor was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (browser), 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
| monaco-editor | Mercury | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 1.5K |
| License | MIT | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 43 |
| 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 Mercury if
- You want the Mercury feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and Mercury 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 Mercury
Mercury Browser Firefox fork with compiler optimizations and patches from Librewolf, Waterfox, Ghostery, and BetterFox. It aims to be the Firefox equivalent of my main project: Thorium (a Chromium fork). Patches See PATCHES.md Bugs See BUGS.md Building See BUILDING.md and DEBUGGING.md.
read the full Mercury overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monaco-editor or Mercury more popular?
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars and Mercury has 1,542. monaco-editor has the larger community by that measure.
Are monaco-editor and Mercury free?
Both are open source. monaco-editor is licensed under MIT and Mercury under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monaco-editor and Mercury?
monaco-editor is written in JavaScript and Mercury in JavaScript. 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 Mercury?
Choose monaco-editor if you want the larger community (46,944 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Mercury if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.