head to head · open source
monaco-editor vs obscura
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars, 4,167 forks, 859 open issues and last shipped yesterday. obscura has 30,141 stars, 2,279 forks, 134 open issues and last shipped yesterday. monaco-editor leads on adoption by 56% (46,944 vs 30,141 stars). monaco-editor is written in JavaScript under MIT; obscura is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. monaco-editor has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, obscura 8%. 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 | obscura | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 30K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| 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 obscura if
- You want the obscura feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and obscura 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 obscura
Obscura The open source headless browser for AI agents and web scraping. Lightweight, stealthy, and built in Rust. Native rendering is here. No Chromium required. 🎉 Capture screenshots, screencast live pages, and export PDFs directly with Obscura. Obscura is a headless browser engine written in Rust, built for web scraping and AI agent automation. It runs real JavaScript via V8, supports the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and acts as a drop in replacement for headless Chrome with Puppeteer and Playwright. Why Obscura over headless Chrome? Obscura inspired Cloudflare Kitesurf’s first prototype Cloudflare began by…
read the full obscura overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monaco-editor or obscura more popular?
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars and obscura has 30,141. monaco-editor has the larger community by that measure.
Are monaco-editor and obscura free?
Both are open source. monaco-editor is licensed under MIT and obscura under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monaco-editor and obscura?
monaco-editor is written in JavaScript and obscura in Rust. 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 obscura?
Choose monaco-editor if you want the larger community (46,944 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose obscura if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.