Ergo vs The Lounge

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

Ergo and The Lounge are closely matched on maintenance health (64 vs 60). Neither is the safer bet on activity alone, so choose on features, licence and the stack you already run.
ErgoThe Lounge
Health score 64/100 60/100
Commits (11 mo) 160 108
Commits (last 3 mo) 57 42
Stars 3.3k 6.3k
Latest release 5 Aug 2026 22 Jul 2026
Licence MIT MIT
Built with Go, Docker Nodejs, Docker
Typical RAM 1 GB 1 GB

Ergo

Modern IRCv3 server written in Go, combining the features of an ircd, a services framework, and a bouncer.

64/100
Steady

Maintained, but at a slower pace than the leaders in its category.

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

Commit activity more than 39% of tracked projects; popularity more than 59%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 2 commits 2025-11: 5 commits 2025-12: 25 commits 2026-01: 6 commits 2026-02: 6 commits 2026-03: 36 commits 2026-04: 16 commits 2026-05: 7 commits 2026-06: 7 commits 2026-07: 33 commits 2026-08: 17 commits

The Lounge

Self-hosted web IRC client.

60/100
Steady

Maintained, but at a slower pace than the leaders in its category.

Maintenance 13/40
Releases 25/25
Community 14/20
Momentum 8/15

Commit activity more than 32% of tracked projects; popularity more than 71%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 0 commits 2025-11: 1 commits 2025-12: 1 commits 2026-01: 2 commits 2026-02: 4 commits 2026-03: 0 commits 2026-04: 52 commits 2026-05: 6 commits 2026-06: 15 commits 2026-07: 23 commits 2026-08: 4 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 communication - irc.