head to head · open source
serenity vs obscura
serenity has 33,938 GitHub stars, 3,488 forks, 739 open issues and last shipped yesterday. obscura has 30,141 stars, 2,279 forks, 134 open issues and last shipped yesterday. serenity leads on adoption by 13% (33,938 vs 30,141 stars). serenity is written in C++ under BSD-2-Clause; obscura is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. serenity has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, obscura 8%. obscura 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| serenity | obscura | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 34K | ★ 30K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C++ | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick serenity if
- You weight community size — 34K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick obscura if
- You want the obscura feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and obscura fits your workflow better
About serenity
SerenityOS Graphical Unix like operating system for 64 bit x86, Arm, and RISC V computers. FAQ Documentation Build Instructions About SerenityOS is a love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems. Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late 1990s productivity software and the power user accessibility of late 2000s \ nix. This is a system by us, for us, based on the things we like. You can watch videos of the system being developed on YouTube: Andreas Kling's channel Linus Groh's…
read the full serenity overview →
About obscura
Obscura The open source headless browser for AI agents and web scraping. Lightweight, stealthy, and built in Rust. Native rendering is here. No Chromium required. 🎉 Capture screenshots, screencast live pages, and export PDFs directly with Obscura. Obscura is a headless browser engine written in Rust, built for web scraping and AI agent automation. It runs real JavaScript via V8, supports the Chrome DevTools Protocol, and acts as a drop in replacement for headless Chrome with Puppeteer and Playwright. Why Obscura over headless Chrome? Obscura inspired Cloudflare Kitesurf’s first prototype Cloudflare began by…
read the full obscura overview →
More in Productivity & Utilities
Related comparisons
More Browsers & Extensions projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Browsers & Extensions field.
Frequently asked questions
Is serenity or obscura more popular?
serenity has 33,938 GitHub stars and obscura has 30,141. serenity has the larger community by that measure.
Are serenity and obscura free?
Both are open source. serenity is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and obscura under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between serenity and obscura?
serenity is written in C++ and obscura 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, serenity or obscura?
Choose serenity if you want the larger community (33,938 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose obscura if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.