head to head · open source
Zed vs devpod
Zed has 92,641 GitHub stars, 11,395 forks, 3,159 open issues and last shipped today. devpod has 15,307 stars, 589 forks, 58 open issues and last shipped 12 months ago. Zed leads on adoption by 505% (92,641 vs 15,307 stars). Zed is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; devpod is written in Go under MPL-2.0. Zed has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, devpod 4%. Zed 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Zed | devpod | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 93K | ★ 15K |
| License | Custom / other | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2025-11-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 589 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Zed if
- You weight community size — 93K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick devpod if
- You want the devpod feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and devpod fits your workflow better
About Zed
Zed Welcome to Zed, a high performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree sitter. Installation On macOS, Linux, and Windows you can download Zed directly or install Zed via your local package manager (macOS/Linux/Windows). Other platforms are not yet available: Web (tracking discussion) Developing Zed Building Zed for macOS Building Zed for Linux Building Zed for Windows Contributing See CONTRIBUTING.md for ways you can contribute to Zed. Also... we're hiring! Check out our jobs page for open roles. Licensing Zed source code is licensed primarily under GPL 3.0 or later, with Apache 2.0…
About devpod
Website • Quickstart • Documentation • Blog • 𝕏 (Twitter) • Slack We are hiring! Come build the future of remote development environments with us. DevPod is a client only tool to create reproducible developer environments based on a devcontainer.json on any backend. Each developer environment runs in a container and is specified through a devcontainer.json. Through DevPod providers, these environments can be created on any backend, such as the local computer, a Kubernetes cluster, any reachable remote machine, or in a VM in the cloud. You can think of DevPod as the glue that connects your local IDE to a machine…
read the full devpod overview →
More in Developer Tools
Related comparisons
More IDEs & Code Editors projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the IDEs & Code Editors field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Zed or devpod more popular?
Zed has 92,641 GitHub stars and devpod has 15,307. Zed has the larger community by that measure.
Are Zed and devpod free?
Both are open source. Zed has no licence declared in this registry, and devpod is licensed under MPL-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Zed and devpod?
Zed is written in Rust and devpod in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Zed or devpod?
Choose Zed if you want the larger community (92,641 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose devpod if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.