head to head · open source
Zed vs fresh
Zed has 90,736 GitHub stars, 10,730 forks, 3,159 open issues and last shipped today. fresh has 8,996 stars, 342 forks, 369 open issues and last shipped today. Zed leads on adoption by 909% (90,736 vs 8,996 stars). Zed is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; fresh is written in Rust under GPL-3.0. Zed has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, fresh 4%. fresh was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (text-editor), 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
| Zed | fresh | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 91K | ★ 9.0K |
| License | Custom / other | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-23 | 2026-09-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 342 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Zed if
- You weight community size — 91K 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 fresh if
- You want the fresh feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and fresh fits your workflow better
About Zed
Zed is a high performance, multiplayer code editor written in Rust, built by the creators of Atom and Tree sitter and aimed at developers who want a native, fast editing surface with AI assistance built in.
About fresh
Fresh is a terminal based IDE and text editor written in Rust and released under the GPL 3.0 licence, aimed at developers who want the familiar editing experience of a graphical editor inside a terminal, with zero configuration required.
read the full fresh overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Zed or fresh more popular?
Zed has 90,736 GitHub stars and fresh has 8,996. Zed has the larger community by that measure.
Are Zed and fresh free?
Both are open source. Zed has no licence declared in this registry, and fresh is licensed under GPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Zed and fresh?
Zed is written in Rust and fresh 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, Zed or fresh?
Choose Zed if you want the larger community (90,736 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose fresh if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.