head to head · open source
NvChad vs fresh
NvChad has 28,530 GitHub stars, 2,212 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. fresh has 9,399 stars, 372 forks, 369 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. NvChad leads on adoption by 204% (28,530 vs 9,399 stars). NvChad is written in Lua under GPL-3.0; fresh is written in Rust under GPL-3.0. NvChad has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, fresh 4%. fresh was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ide), 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
| NvChad | fresh | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 9.4K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Lua | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-10-24 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.2K | ⑂ 372 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick NvChad if
- You weight community size — 29K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Lua
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick fresh if
- You want the fresh feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and fresh fits your workflow better
About NvChad
NvChad Home • Install • Contribute • Support • Features Showcase What is it? NvChad is a neovim config written in lua aiming to provide a base configuration with very beautiful UI and blazing fast startuptime (around 0.02 secs 0.07 secs). We tweak UI plugins such as telescope, nvim tree etc well to provide an aesthetic UI experience. Lazy loading is done 93% of the time meaning that plugins will not be loaded by default, they will be loaded only when required also at specific commands, events etc. This lowers the startuptime and it was like 0.07 secs tested on an old pentium machine 1.4ghz + 4gb ram & HDD…
read the full NvChad overview →
About fresh
Fresh A modern, full featured terminal text editor, with zero configuration . Familiar keybindings, mouse support, and IDE level features — no learning curve required. Official Website · Documentation · Discord · Contributing Quick Install: curl fsSL sh Fresh brings the intuitive UX of VS Code and Sublime Text to the terminal. Standard keybindings, full mouse support, menus, and a command palette — everything works the way you'd expect, right out of the box. No modes, no memorizing shortcuts. Built for real world performance: Fresh handles multi gigabyte files with negligible memory overhead and delivers…
read the full fresh overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NvChad or fresh more popular?
NvChad has 28,530 GitHub stars and fresh has 9,399. NvChad has the larger community by that measure.
Are NvChad and fresh free?
Both are open source. NvChad is licensed under GPL-3.0 and fresh under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NvChad and fresh?
NvChad is written in Lua and fresh 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, NvChad or fresh?
Choose NvChad if you want the larger community (28,530 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose fresh if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.