head to head · open source
slate vs obscura
slate has 31,747 GitHub stars, 3,306 forks, 653 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. obscura has 30,141 stars, 2,279 forks, 134 open issues and last shipped yesterday. slate leads on adoption by 5% (31,747 vs 30,141 stars). slate is written in TypeScript under MIT; obscura is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. slate 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.
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Side by side
| slate | obscura | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 30K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-10-28 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick slate if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- 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 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 →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is slate or obscura more popular?
slate has 31,747 GitHub stars and obscura has 30,141. slate has the larger community by that measure.
Are slate and obscura free?
Both are open source. slate is licensed under MIT and obscura under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between slate and obscura?
slate is written in TypeScript 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, slate or obscura?
Choose slate if you want the larger community (31,747 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose obscura if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.