head to head · open source
Zed vs helix
Zed has 92,568 GitHub stars, 11,364 forks, 3,159 open issues and last shipped yesterday. helix has 46,772 stars, 4,011 forks, 1,671 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Zed leads on adoption by 98% (92,568 vs 46,772 stars). Zed is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; helix is written in Rust under MPL-2.0. Zed has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, helix 9%. 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 | helix | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 93K | ★ 47K |
| License | Custom / other | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-09-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 4.0K |
| 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 helix if
- You want the helix feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and helix 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 helix
A Kakoune / Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust. The editing model is very heavily based on Kakoune; during development I found myself agreeing with most of Kakoune's design decisions. For more information, see the website or documentation. All shortcuts/keymaps can be found in the documentation on the website. Troubleshooting Features Vim like modal editing Multiple selections Built in language server support Smart, incremental syntax highlighting and code editing via tree sitter Although it's primarily a terminal based editor, I am interested in exploring a custom renderer (similar to Emacs) using wgpu…
read the full helix overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Zed or helix more popular?
Zed has 92,568 GitHub stars and helix has 46,772. Zed has the larger community by that measure.
Are Zed and helix free?
Both are open source. Zed has no licence declared in this registry, and helix is licensed under MPL-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Zed and helix?
Zed is written in Rust and helix 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 helix?
Choose Zed if you want the larger community (92,568 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose helix if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.