head to head · open source
serenity vs slate
serenity has 33,938 GitHub stars, 3,488 forks, 739 open issues and last shipped yesterday. slate has 31,747 stars, 3,306 forks, 653 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. serenity leads on adoption by 7% (33,938 vs 31,747 stars). serenity is written in C++ under BSD-2-Clause; slate is written in TypeScript under MIT. serenity has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, slate 10%. serenity 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
| serenity | slate | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 34K | ★ 32K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C++ | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 3.3K |
| 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 slate if
- You want the slate feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and slate 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 slate
A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors. Why? · Principles · Demo · Examples · Documentation · Contributing! Slate lets you build rich, intuitive editors like those in Medium, Dropbox Paper or Google Docs—which are becoming table stakes for applications on the web—without your codebase getting mired in complexity. It can do this because all of its logic is implemented with a series of plugins, so you aren't ever constrained by what is or isn't in "core". You can think of it like a pluggable implementation of contenteditable built on top of React. It was inspired by libraries like…
read the full slate overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is serenity or slate more popular?
serenity has 33,938 GitHub stars and slate has 31,747. serenity has the larger community by that measure.
Are serenity and slate free?
Both are open source. serenity is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and slate under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between serenity and slate?
serenity is written in C++ and slate in TypeScript. 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 slate?
Choose serenity if you want the larger community (33,938 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose slate if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.