head to head · open source
Zed vs vscodium
Zed has 92,568 GitHub stars, 11,364 forks, 3,159 open issues and last shipped yesterday. vscodium has 33,919 stars, 1,918 forks, 146 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Zed leads on adoption by 173% (92,568 vs 33,919 stars). Zed is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; vscodium is written in Shell under MIT. Zed has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, vscodium 6%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Zed | vscodium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 93K | ★ 34K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | Shell |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 11K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| 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 vscodium if
- You want the vscodium feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Shell
- You evaluated both and vscodium 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 vscodium
VSCodium Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of Visual Studio Code This is not a fork. This is a repository of scripts to automatically build Microsoft's vscode repository into freely licensed binaries with a community driven default configuration. Table of Contents Download/Install Install with Brew Install with Windows Package Manager (WinGet) Install with Chocolatey Install with Scoop Install with snap Install with Package Manager Install on Arch Linux Flatpak Option Build Why Does This Exist More Info Supported Platforms Previously Supported Platforms Download/Install :tada: :tada: Download latest…
read the full vscodium overview →
More in Developer Tools
Related comparisons
More IDEs & Code Editors projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the IDEs & Code Editors field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Zed or vscodium more popular?
Zed has 92,568 GitHub stars and vscodium has 33,919. Zed has the larger community by that measure.
Are Zed and vscodium free?
Both are open source. Zed has no licence declared in this registry, and vscodium is licensed under MIT. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Zed and vscodium?
Zed is written in Rust and vscodium in Shell. 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 vscodium?
Choose Zed if you want the larger community (92,568 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose vscodium if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.