Element vs Quiet

Element significantly outpaces Quiet in community adoption with 13,392 stars compared to 2,638 stars on GitHub. This 5.1x difference suggests Element has a much larger and more active community. In terms of developer contributions, Element has 2,731 forks, indicating strong developer engagement.

Element and Quiet are moving at much the same rate, adding 80 stars and adding 17 stars respectively over the last 30 days (+0.6% vs +0.6%). Neither is pulling away from the other on momentum alone.

Both projects show recent activity, with Element last updated 10 hours ago and Quiet 2 days ago.

Both tools share common technology foundations, being built with JavaScript, Bash, Typescript, JSX, Python. However, they differ in their additional technology choices: Element uses CSS, Perl while Quiet leverages C, Objective-C, Java, Swift, C++, Ruby, Kotlin, MATLAB, NestJS.

Element has been in development longer, starting 11 years ago, compared to Quiet which began 5 years ago. This 6.5-year head start suggests Element may have more mature features and established processes.

The projects use different licenses: Element is licensed under AGPL-3.0 while Quiet uses GPL-3.0. Consider the licensing requirements when choosing for your project.

Both tools serve similar use cases in Team Chat & Messaging, Encrypted Communication.

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