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Theia Alternatives
Similar projects and alternatives to theia
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SurveyJS
SurveyJS: Build JSON-Driven Surveys and Forms with Full Data Control. Add the SurveyJS UI components to your JS app (React/Angular/Vue3). Securely collect and analyze data without sending it to 3rd-party servers. Fully customizable, works with any backend, and ideal for data-heavy apps. Learn more.
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libcurl
A command line tool and library for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET, TFTP, WS and WSS. libcurl offers a myriad of powerful features
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zed
Code at the speed of thought – Zed is a high-performance, multiplayer code editor from the creators of Atom and Tree-sitter.
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Stream
Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video. Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.
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Roslyn
The Roslyn .NET compiler provides C# and Visual Basic languages with rich code analysis APIs.
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openvscode-server
Run upstream VS Code on a remote machine with access through a modern web browser from any device, anywhere.
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brackets
An open source code editor for the web, written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. (by brackets-cont)
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ccls
C/C++/ObjC language server supporting cross references, hierarchies, completion and semantic highlighting
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a better theia alternative or higher similarity.
theia discussion
theia reviews and mentions
Posts with mentions or reviews of theia. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-07-27.
- Theia IDE – AI-Native Open-Source Cloud and Desktop IDE
- Disabling telemetry in ByteDance's VSCode fork increases data sent to its server
There's also the Eclipse VScode-look-alike-reimplementation called TheiaIDE
https://theia-ide.org/
It was rough a few years ago, but nowadays it's pretty nice. TI rebuilt their Code Composer Studio using Theia so it does have some larger users.
It's VSCode-with-an-Eclipse-feel to it - which might or might not be your cup of tea, but it's an alternative.
- OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours
100% this. It would be one thing if the only LSPs you could build came from Microsoft, but that’s just not true. It’s just that developing LSPs isn’t free.
Cursor, Windsurf, etc. are building multi-billion dollar businesses off the backs of the work that the VS Code team has done. And that’s totally fine! What’s not fine, is trying to have access to the whole ecosystem of first party extensions that aren’t MIT licensed.
I agree there should be more resilient extension repos, but this is one of the problems Eclipse Theia [0] has tried to take on, but most projects just fork the core VS Code experience and slot in OpenVSX rather than doing the hard, expensive work of building their own extension marketplaces or LSPs. And you know what, for a community or OSS fork, I think that’s fair. I think when you raise hundreds of millions in funding, you can build your own LSPs and start to maintain your own infra for extensions. And if you’ve got enough buy-in, you can probably convince developers to submit directly to your marketplace too.
And it isn’t even a rug pull, per se. The first changes to the license on some of the 1P VS Code extensions probably happened in late 2018 or early 2019, with remote share. The LSPs may have changed later. If anything, the Code team was probably too lax about letting the commercial forks use their resources wholesale against the license terms for as long as they did.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft and then at GitHub with things that touched VS Code. I now work at Google, who uses VS Code (well Monaco) inside some of our editors/products, but I don’t work on any of those.
[0]: https://theia-ide.org/
- Important open source projects should not use GitHub (2020)
Big corporations are not monoliths, despite them having an overall singular personality. I believe that vscode was a sincere attempt, at least in the beginning. While based on electron which was originally developed for Atom, vscode was always much more performant than atom.
But when it did gain a lot of developer attention, MS's true nature took hold and gradually converted it into the walled garden we see today. It was more subtle in the beginning - a few useful extensions were proprietary and wouldn't work on non-MS builds of vscode. It was like a gentle nudge to the developers to migrate to their opaque proprietary builds. Of course, we have seen that before, haven't we?
As an aside, if you like vscode but hate the manipulation, you should give the Eclipse Theia editor [1] a try. It's an almost complete reimplementation of vscode and is compatible with the extensions from OpenVSX. I believe that they have fairer alternatives for collaborative editing, etc. At least, they will spare you the manipulation.
[1] https://theia-ide.org/
- Eclipse Theia: The 'DeepSeek' of AI Tooling?
> Following DeepSeek's disruption of the LLM landscape, the Eclipse Foundation bets that collaborative, open source AI tooling can outmaneuver billion-dollar proprietary competitors.
Maybe! Eclipse Theia was a pretty great web capable editor when I gave it a spin in ~2018.
The main thing I've wanted has been collaboration. Looks like there's been some real progress on that front, as of this past fall. Definitely like the idea of multiparty IDEs, and if AI can come play in that mix that will would be interesting! Feels like AI has been a pretty solo you & the machine experience.
https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia/issues/2842
- Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture
MS is a bit weird. After realizing that most competent developers had left the MS ecosystem, they went for a Zeitenwende. But they did only for 90%.
I wonder to what extent this halfheartedness should be ascribed to the MS org chart or to reasoning like "we should prevent a competent competitor to run away with our tools".
In the mean time, there is a capable replacement named Theia [0] with none of the strings attached. We as a whole would do best to move to that one. [1]
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0. https://theia-ide.org/#theiaide
1. That is to say: for vscode kind of experience. Native IDE's are unbeatable imho.
- Show HN: Void, an open-source Cursor/GitHub Copilot alternative
As someone who has recently tried to refactor our app atop of VSCode (treating it like a platform), we got burned by the UI design decisions that are not straightforward to overcome, let alone maintain. The closed-source MS marketplace did not help either towards our OSS goals.
However, I found Theia (https://theia-ide.org) on HN (like a bunch of other cool things; this is one way I justify the time I spend/sink on this site) and find it a much better fit for our OSS goals (foundation owned, open-source marketplace) with full mod-ability while being compatible to VSCode extensions API (in theory). I recommend you look into it for your app.
- Zed on Linux Is Here
You should give Theia Ide [1] a try. It's plugin-compatible with VSCode, same user experience. It's slower to start and takes more memory but on my 3 y.o. intel Mac it is definitely snappier than VScode.
[1] https://theia-ide.org/
- The Eclipse Theia Platform
- Eclipse Theia IDE
No, it's not a fork.
Theia reuses some components (like the Monaco code editor), but the reason it looks and feels a lot like VSCode is mostly that they decided to copy it.
They explain the reasons for creating a VSCode clone here [1]. In short, VSCode is not really open source, and Theia wants the code to be both truly free and unencumbered by Microsoft's licensing and proprietary code, and also available to commercial vendors to use as the foundation for commercial products.
This earlier HN discussion has a lot more discussion [2].
I think the Eclipse people could have communicated all of this a lot better. When you put a VSCode clone in front of developers, your first task needs to be to explain how it's not a fork, and why it exists. The Theia site's front page [3] doesn't even mention VSCode by name.
[1] https://blogs.eclipse.org/post/mike-milinkovich/eclipse-thei...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738607
[3] https://theia-ide.org/
- A note from our sponsor - SurveyJS surveyjs.io | 24 Dec 2025
Stats
Basic theia repo stats
65
21,236
9.8
5 days ago
eclipse-theia/theia is an open source project licensed under Eclipse Public License 2.0 which is an OSI approved license.
The primary programming language of theia is TypeScript.
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