Weechat 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.

Weechat scores 79 against ZNC's 50, putting it clearly ahead on the strength of a higher commit volume and more recent releases. That measures project health, not feature fit — ZNC may still be the right choice if it does what you need.

	Weechat	ZNC
Health score	79/100	50/100
Commits (11 mo)	566	140
Commits (last 3 mo)	271	49
Stars	3.4k	2.1k
Latest release	5 Sept 2026	none tagged
Licence	GPL-3.0	Apache-2.0
Built with	C, Docker, deb	C++, deb
Typical RAM	1 GB	1 GB

Weechat

Fast, light and extensible chat client.

79/100

Healthy

Actively maintained with regular releases.

Maintenance 27/40

Releases 25/25

Community 12/20

Momentum 15/15

Commit activity more than 67% of tracked projects; popularity more than 60%. 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.