head to head · open source
owncast vs koala
owncast has 11,543 GitHub stars, 1,180 forks, 165 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. koala has 3,568 stars, 456 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. owncast leads on adoption by 224% (11,543 vs 3,568 stars). owncast is written in Go under MIT; koala is written in Ruby under MIT. owncast has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, koala 13%. owncast 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
| owncast | koala | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 12K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2025-10-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 456 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick owncast if
- You weight community size — 12K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick koala if
- You want the koala feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and koala fits your workflow better
About owncast
Owncast is an open source, self hosted, single user live video streaming and chat server written in Go, with a React frontend, released under the MIT license. It positions itself as a way to run your own live streams in a style similar to the large mainstream streaming services, while keeping complete ownership over your content, interface, moderation, and audience. The project lives in the fediverse: its topic list covers ActivityPub, federation, and decentralized networking, placing it alongside other federated social software rather than inside a proprietary platform.
read the full owncast overview →
About koala
Koala is a lightweight Ruby library for Facebook APIs. It supports the Graph API, the Marketing API, the Atlas API, realtime updates, test users, and OAuth validation. It lives in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails ecosystem and provides API accessors that return simple JSON responses.
read the full koala overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is owncast or koala more popular?
owncast has 11,543 GitHub stars and koala has 3,568. owncast has the larger community by that measure.
Are owncast and koala free?
Both are open source. owncast is licensed under MIT and koala under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between owncast and koala?
owncast is written in Go and koala in Ruby. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, owncast or koala?
Choose owncast if you want the larger community (11,543 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose koala if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.