head to head · open source
Zed vs geany
Zed has 91,215 GitHub stars, 10,881 forks, 3,159 open issues and last shipped today. geany has 3,725 stars, 667 forks, 1,281 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. Zed leads on adoption by 2,349% (91,215 vs 3,725 stars). Zed is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; geany is written in C under GPL-2.0. Zed has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, geany 18%. 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 | geany | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 91K | ★ 3.7K |
| License | Custom / other | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | C |
| Last push | 2026-10-03 | 2026-09-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 667 |
| 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 geany if
- You want the geany feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and geany 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 geany
Geany is a small, fast, GPL 2.0 licensed integrated development environment written in C for developers who want IDE features without the weight of a heavy, desktop environment bound toolchain.
read the full geany overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Zed or geany more popular?
Zed has 91,215 GitHub stars and geany has 3,725. Zed has the larger community by that measure.
Are Zed and geany free?
Both are open source. Zed has no licence declared in this registry, and geany is licensed under GPL-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Zed and geany?
Zed is written in Rust and geany in C. 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 geany?
Choose Zed if you want the larger community (91,215 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose geany if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.