Audiobookshelf vs Calibre Web

Both are self-hosted document management - e-books projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.

Audiobookshelf and Calibre Web are closely matched on maintenance health (79 vs 78). Neither is the safer bet on activity alone, so choose on features, licence and the stack you already run.
AudiobookshelfCalibre Web
Health score 79/100 78/100
Commits (11 mo) 475 284
Commits (last 3 mo) 128 93
Stars 14k 18k
Latest release 16 Sept 2026 8 Aug 2026
Licence GPL-3.0 GPL-3.0
Built with Docker, deb, Nodejs Python
Typical RAM 1 GB 1 GB

Audiobookshelf

Audiobook and podcast server. It streams all audio formats, keeps and syncs progress across devices. Comes with apps for Android and iOS.

79/100
Healthy

Actively maintained with regular releases.

Maintenance 25/40
Releases 25/25
Community 17/20
Momentum 12/15

Commit activity more than 62% of tracked projects; popularity more than 84%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 75 commits 2025-11: 58 commits 2025-12: 45 commits 2026-01: 3 commits 2026-02: 37 commits 2026-03: 56 commits 2026-04: 50 commits 2026-05: 23 commits 2026-06: 14 commits 2026-07: 79 commits 2026-08: 35 commits

Calibre Web

Browse, read and download eBooks using an existing Calibre database.

78/100
Healthy

Actively maintained with regular releases.

Maintenance 20/40
Releases 25/25
Community 17/20
Momentum 15/15

Commit activity more than 51% of tracked projects; popularity more than 87%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 12 commits 2025-11: 16 commits 2025-12: 28 commits 2026-01: 43 commits 2026-02: 27 commits 2026-03: 9 commits 2026-04: 46 commits 2026-05: 10 commits 2026-06: 3 commits 2026-07: 6 commits 2026-08: 84 commits

How to read this

Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.

What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.

See every option in this category: self-hosted document management - e-books.