InspIRCd vs ZNC

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.

InspIRCd scores 65 against ZNC's 50, putting it ahead on the strength of more recent releases. That measures project health, not feature fit — ZNC may still be the right choice if it does what you need.

	InspIRCd	ZNC
Health score	65/100	50/100
Commits (11 mo)	274	140
Commits (last 3 mo)	107	49
Stars	1.3k	2.1k
Latest release	26 Sept 2026	none tagged
Licence	GPL-2.0	Apache-2.0
Built with	C++, Docker	C++, deb
Typical RAM	1 GB	1 GB

InspIRCd

Modular IRC server written in C++ for Linux, BSD, Windows, and macOS.

65/100

Steady

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

Maintenance 20/40

Releases 25/25

Community 8/20

Momentum 12/15

Commit activity more than 51% of tracked projects; popularity more than 40%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

ZNC

Advanced IRC bouncer.

50/100

Slowing

Activity has dropped noticeably. Check the repository before committing to it.

Maintenance 15/40

Releases 13/25

Community 10/20

Momentum 12/15

Commit activity more than 37% of tracked projects; popularity more than 50%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

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.