head to head · open source
Zen Browser vs thorium
Zen Browser has 45,517 GitHub stars, 1,946 forks, 689 open issues and last shipped yesterday. thorium has 7,620 stars, 297 forks, 140 open issues and last shipped 23 days ago. Zen Browser leads on adoption by 497% (45,517 vs 7,620 stars). Zen Browser is written in C++ under MPL-2.0; thorium is written in C++ under BSD-3-Clause. Zen Browser has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, thorium 4%. Zen Browser 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
| Zen Browser | thorium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 7.6K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | C++ | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 297 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Zen Browser if
- You weight community size — 46K stars and counting
- You want the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick thorium if
- You want the thorium feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and thorium fits your workflow better
About Zen Browser
Zen Browser Zen is a firefox based browser with the aim of pushing your productivity to a new level! Download • Website • Documentation • Release Notes Firefox Versions Release Is currently built using Firefox version 155.0.1 ! Twilight Is currently built using Firefox version RC 155.0.1 ! Contributing If you'd like to report a bug, please do so on our GitHub Issues page and for feature requests, you can use GitHub Discussions. Zen is an open source project, and we welcome contributions from the community! Please take a look at the contribution guidelines before getting started! Partners Thanks to all the…
read the full Zen Browser overview →
About thorium
Thorium Chromium fork for linux named after radioactive element No. 90. Windows/MacOS/RasPi/Android/Other builds see below. Always built with the latest LTS version of Chromium. Intended to behave like and have the featureset of Google Chrome, with differences/patches/enhancements listed below. Compiler optimizations such as LTO, CFlag, LDFlag, LLVM Loop, and PGO, to make it FAST. :boom: In addition, we release builds tailored to different CPUs with different SIMD instructions, for even more execution speed. We offer SSE3, SSE4, AVX, and AVX2 builds, named as such in the Releases. If you are unsure which one to…
read the full thorium overview →
More in Productivity & Utilities
Related comparisons
More Browsers & Extensions projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Browsers & Extensions field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Zen Browser or thorium more popular?
Zen Browser has 45,517 GitHub stars and thorium has 7,620. Zen Browser has the larger community by that measure.
Are Zen Browser and thorium free?
Both are open source. Zen Browser is licensed under MPL-2.0 and thorium under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Zen Browser and thorium?
Zen Browser is written in C++ and thorium 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, Zen Browser or thorium?
Choose Zen Browser if you want the larger community (45,517 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose thorium if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.