head to head · open source
Zed vs NvChad
Zed has 92,568 GitHub stars, 11,364 forks, 3,159 open issues and last shipped yesterday. NvChad has 28,529 stars, 2,212 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. Zed leads on adoption by 224% (92,568 vs 28,529 stars). Zed is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; NvChad is written in Lua under GPL-3.0. Zed has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, NvChad 8%. 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.
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Side by side
| Zed | NvChad | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 93K | ★ 29K |
| License | Custom / other | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Lua |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| 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 NvChad if
- You want the NvChad feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Lua
- You evaluated both and NvChad 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 NvChad
NvChad Home • Install • Contribute • Support • Features Showcase What is it? NvChad is a neovim config written in lua aiming to provide a base configuration with very beautiful UI and blazing fast startuptime (around 0.02 secs 0.07 secs). We tweak UI plugins such as telescope, nvim tree etc well to provide an aesthetic UI experience. Lazy loading is done 93% of the time meaning that plugins will not be loaded by default, they will be loaded only when required also at specific commands, events etc. This lowers the startuptime and it was like 0.07 secs tested on an old pentium machine 1.4ghz + 4gb ram & HDD…
read the full NvChad overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Zed or NvChad more popular?
Zed has 92,568 GitHub stars and NvChad has 28,529. Zed has the larger community by that measure.
Are Zed and NvChad free?
Both are open source. Zed has no licence declared in this registry, and NvChad is licensed under GPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Zed and NvChad?
Zed is written in Rust and NvChad in Lua. 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 NvChad?
Choose Zed if you want the larger community (92,568 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose NvChad if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.