head to head · open source
Pixelfed vs koala
Pixelfed has 7,105 GitHub stars, 881 forks, 116 open issues and last shipped yesterday. koala has 3,568 stars, 456 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. Pixelfed leads on adoption by 99% (7,105 vs 3,568 stars). Pixelfed is written in PHP under AGPL-3.0; koala is written in Ruby under MIT. Pixelfed has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, koala 13%. Pixelfed was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (social-network), 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
| Pixelfed | koala | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 7.1K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2025-10-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 881 | ⑂ 456 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Pixelfed if
- You weight community size — 7.1K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- 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 Pixelfed
Pixelfed is an open source, ad free photo sharing platform written in PHP and released under the AGPL 3.0 license. It is built on the Laravel framework and lives in the fediverse, the federated social web, communicating with other servers through the ActivityPub protocol. The project describes itself as photo sharing "the way it should be," letting casual shots and creative photography find an audience without algorithmic barriers.
read the full Pixelfed 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 Pixelfed or koala more popular?
Pixelfed has 7,105 GitHub stars and koala has 3,568. Pixelfed has the larger community by that measure.
Are Pixelfed and koala free?
Both are open source. Pixelfed is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and koala under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Pixelfed and koala?
Pixelfed is written in PHP 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, Pixelfed or koala?
Choose Pixelfed if you want the larger community (7,105 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose koala if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.