head to head · open source
Zed vs fresh
Zed has 93,759 GitHub stars, 11,509 forks, 3,159 open issues and last shipped yesterday. fresh has 9,420 stars, 375 forks, 369 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Zed leads on adoption by 895% (93,759 vs 9,420 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%. Zed 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 | ★ 94K | ★ 9.4K |
| License | Custom / other | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-07 | 2026-11-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 375 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Zed if
- You weight community size — 94K 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 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 fresh
Fresh A modern, full featured terminal text editor, with zero configuration . Familiar keybindings, mouse support, and IDE level features — no learning curve required. Official Website · Documentation · Discord · Contributing Quick Install: curl fsSL sh Fresh brings the intuitive UX of VS Code and Sublime Text to the terminal. Standard keybindings, full mouse support, menus, and a command palette — everything works the way you'd expect, right out of the box. No modes, no memorizing shortcuts. Built for real world performance: Fresh handles multi gigabyte files with negligible memory overhead and delivers…
read the full fresh overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Zed or fresh more popular?
Zed has 93,759 GitHub stars and fresh has 9,420. 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 (93,759 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.