Cinny vs Hazel

Cinny significantly outpaces Hazel in community adoption with 3,983 stars compared to 738 stars on GitHub. This 5.4x difference suggests Cinny has a much larger and more active community. In terms of developer contributions, Cinny has 607 forks, indicating moderate developer engagement.

Hazel is growing faster, adding 12 stars in the last 30 days (+1.7%) against adding 48 stars for Cinny (+1.2%). Hazel is the smaller project of the two, so it is closing the gap rather than extending a lead.

Both projects show recent activity, with Cinny last updated 14 hours ago and Hazel 6 hours ago.

Both tools share common technology foundations, being built with JavaScript, CSS, Typescript, JSX. However, they differ in their additional technology choices: Cinny uses SCSS while Hazel leverages Bash, Rust, Kotlin, Tauri, Tanstack Start.

Cinny has been in development longer, starting 6 years ago, compared to Hazel which began 2 years ago. This 4.1-year head start suggests Cinny may have more mature features and established processes.

The projects use different licenses: Cinny is licensed under AGPL-3.0 while Hazel uses FSL-1.1-ALv2. Consider the licensing requirements when choosing for your project.

Both tools serve similar use cases in Team Chat & Messaging. However, they also have distinct specializations: Cinny also focuses on Encrypted Communication, Decentralized Social Networks.

Hazel provides self-hosting options for complete data control and customization, while Cinny may be primarily cloud-based or require different deployment approaches.