head to head · open source
monaco-editor vs thorium
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars, 4,167 forks, 859 open issues and last shipped yesterday. thorium has 7,620 stars, 297 forks, 140 open issues and last shipped 23 days ago. monaco-editor leads on adoption by 516% (46,944 vs 7,620 stars). monaco-editor is written in JavaScript under MIT; thorium is written in C++ under BSD-3-Clause. monaco-editor has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, thorium 4%. 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 | thorium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 7.6K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | JavaScript | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 297 |
| 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 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 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 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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monaco-editor or thorium more popular?
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars and thorium has 7,620. monaco-editor has the larger community by that measure.
Are monaco-editor and thorium free?
Both are open source. monaco-editor is licensed under MIT and thorium under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monaco-editor and thorium?
monaco-editor 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, monaco-editor or thorium?
Choose monaco-editor if you want the larger community (46,944 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose thorium if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.