head to head · open source
writefreely vs koala
writefreely has 5,254 GitHub stars, 398 forks, 108 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. koala has 3,568 stars, 456 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. writefreely leads on adoption by 47% (5,254 vs 3,568 stars). writefreely is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; koala is written in Ruby under MIT. writefreely has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, koala 13%. writefreely was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| writefreely | koala | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 5.3K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2025-10-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 398 | ⑂ 456 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick writefreely if
- You weight community size — 5.3K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 writefreely
WriteFreely is a clean, minimalist publishing platform made for writers, released under the AGPL 3.0 license and written in Go. It belongs to the fediverse: an ecosystem of federated publishing and social software that speaks ActivityPub, the same protocol used by Plume and other ActivityPub powered applications. An instance can be a single writer's blog, a shared internal knowledge base inside an organization, or a community built around the shared act of writing.
read the full writefreely 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 writefreely or koala more popular?
writefreely has 5,254 GitHub stars and koala has 3,568. writefreely has the larger community by that measure.
Are writefreely and koala free?
Both are open source. writefreely is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and koala under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between writefreely and koala?
writefreely is written in Go 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, writefreely or koala?
Choose writefreely if you want the larger community (5,254 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose koala if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.