head to head · open source
monaco-editor vs zip.js
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars, 4,167 forks, 859 open issues and last shipped yesterday. zip.js has 3,905 stars, 546 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. monaco-editor leads on adoption by 1,102% (46,944 vs 3,905 stars). monaco-editor is written in JavaScript under MIT; zip.js is written in JavaScript under BSD-3-Clause. monaco-editor has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, zip.js 14%. 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 | zip.js | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 47K | ★ 3.9K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | JavaScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.2K | ⑂ 546 |
| 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 zip.js if
- You want the zip.js feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and zip.js 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 zip.js
Introduction zip.js is a JavaScript open source library (BSD 3 Clause license) for compressing and decompressing zip files. It has been designed to handle large amounts of data. It supports notably multi core compression, native compression with compression streams, pluggable compression engines, archives larger than 4GB with Zip64, split zip files, data encryption, incremental writing, and Deflate64 decompression. Demo See Documentation See here for more info: Examples Hello world Run the code on JSFiddle: Hello world with the filesystem API The filesystem API stores the entries in a tree instead of a flat…
read the full zip.js overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is monaco-editor or zip.js more popular?
monaco-editor has 46,944 GitHub stars and zip.js has 3,905. monaco-editor has the larger community by that measure.
Are monaco-editor and zip.js free?
Both are open source. monaco-editor is licensed under MIT and zip.js under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between monaco-editor and zip.js?
monaco-editor is written in JavaScript and zip.js 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 zip.js?
Choose monaco-editor if you want the larger community (46,944 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose zip.js if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.