head to head · open source
cobalt vs univer
cobalt has 43,661 GitHub stars, 3,825 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. univer has 14,417 stars, 1,303 forks, 151 open issues and last shipped today. cobalt leads on adoption by 203% (43,661 vs 14,417 stars). cobalt is written in Svelte under AGPL-3.0; univer is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. cobalt has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, univer 9%. univer was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (collaboration), 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
| cobalt | univer | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 14K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Svelte | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-04-06 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.8K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick cobalt if
- You weight community size — 44K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Svelte
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick univer if
- You want the univer feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and univer fits your workflow better
About cobalt
cobalt is a media downloader built around a single promise: paste a link, get the file, move on. It is a monorepo containing the source for an API, a web frontend, and related packages, written primarily in Svelte and TypeScript. The project lives in the modern web and JavaScript ecosystem, and its public surface is hosted at cobalt.tools, while the full codebase is published under the AGPL 3.0 license.
read the full cobalt overview →
About univer
Univer is an open source, full stack office SDK for building spreadsheet, document and presentation interfaces inside your own product. Rather than shipping an end user office suite, it gives developers the primitives — a Canvas based renderer, a formula engine, a plugin architecture and a single Facade API — to embed spreadsheet and document editing into a web application or run the same logic headlessly on Node.js.
read the full univer overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cobalt or univer more popular?
cobalt has 43,661 GitHub stars and univer has 14,417. cobalt has the larger community by that measure.
Are cobalt and univer free?
Both are open source. cobalt is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and univer under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cobalt and univer?
cobalt is written in Svelte and univer 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, cobalt or univer?
Choose cobalt if you want the larger community (43,661 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose univer if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.