The Lounge VS Glowing Bear

Compare The Lounge vs Glowing Bear and see what are their differences.

The Lounge

💬 ‎ Modern, responsive, cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client (by thelounge)
Our great sponsors
  • SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
The Lounge Glowing Bear
61 1
5,351 932
1.5% 0.6%
8.3 5.8
about 12 hours ago 5 days ago
TypeScript JavaScript
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

The Lounge

Posts with mentions or reviews of The Lounge. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-13.
  • Simplicity of IRC
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Mar 2024
    IRC as a protocol is indeed incredibly simple and easy to get started with. Years ago did discover this when I was able to make [this atrocity](https://github.com/creesch/discordIRCd) bridging IRC and discord where for IRC I effectively did a simple server implementation.

    There is a caveat, though. Like many older protocols (ftp) there is a lot that was not initially written down or left up to clients and server implementations. This, does lead to a lot of edge cases you need to be aware of once you want to actually support a wider user group.

    Also, as this is apparently is still a discussion. IRC is not simple from a modern user UX perception. Registration can be complex and confusing, though hidden a bit through clients. Managing channels with various flags is a whole other thing. Then there is also the fact that these days people are no longer used to the fact that they can't see messages from periods where they were not connected. Of course, the latter can be easily handled by a BNC or fancy clients like https://thelounge.chat . But, that is only easy for technically inclined folks.

  • Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Jan 2024
    > It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7.

    You can just set up something like The Lounge [0].

    [0] https://thelounge.chat/

  • Show HN: GodotOS: A Fake Operating System Interface Made in the Godot Engine
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jan 2024
    Excellent idea! You'll have a mature, open standard protocol under the hood, with no vendor lock-in, excellent extensibility, and great modern frontends like The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat/) or Convos (https://convos.chat/) to choose from (and you can choose).
  • IRC Is the Only Viable Chat Protocol
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jul 2023
    > But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority.

    Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android.

    In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then we had the same problem again in the mobile world, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support.

    The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market.

    If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously required you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone.

    The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2].

    [1] https://quassel-irc.org/

    [2] https://thelounge.chat/

    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jul 2023
  • Show HN: Halloy – A GUI Application in Rust for IRC
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jun 2023
  • Matrix 2.0: How we’re making Matrix go voom
    28 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Feb 2023
    For the other layers one can front-end IRC with TheLounge [1][2] or Convos [3][4]. TheLounge only persists history in private mode meaning that users are created in that front-end and chat messages are in Redis. For small networks or groups of friends this is probably fine.

    Notably missing is voice chat. I use the Mumble client [5] with the Murmur or uMurmur [6] server which is light-weight enough to run on ones home router. I use it on Alpine Linux, works great. It's not a shiny and attention grabbing as Discord but probably fine for everyone else. For people to create their own voice channels would require the full-blown Murmur server.

    [1] - https://github.com/thelounge

    [2] - https://thelounge.chat/

    [3] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/

    [4] - https://convos.chat/

    [5] - https://www.mumble.info/

    [6] - https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur/wiki/Configuration

  • Most used selfhosted services in 2022?
    103 projects | /r/selfhosted | 27 Dec 2022
    TheLounge (https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge) - web IRC client that I set to listen on my vpn/mesh. Works great on desktop and mobile, and supports push notifications.
  • TheLounge: Modern, responsive, cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Dec 2022
  • IRCv3 2022 Spec round-up
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Nov 2022
    FWIW TheLounge [1] and Convos [2] can front-end an IRC server giving it much of the look of a modern client and also chat persistence when using TheLounge in private mode. The trade-off in my opinion is scalability. With a bog standard IRCD I can handle tens of thousands of clients per node. Adding web persistent chat adds memory usage.

    [1] - https://github.com/thelounge https://thelounge.chat/

    [2] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/ https://convos.chat/

Glowing Bear

Posts with mentions or reviews of Glowing Bear. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects.

We haven't tracked posts mentioning Glowing Bear yet.
Tracking mentions began in Dec 2020.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing The Lounge and Glowing Bear you can also consider the following projects:

ZNC - Official repository for the ZNC IRC bouncer

Kiwi IRC - 🥝 Next generation of the Kiwi IRC web client

Convos - Convos :busts_in_silhouette: is the simplest way to use IRC in your browser [Moved to: https://github.com/convos-chat/convos]

Quassel IRC - Quassel IRC: Chat comfortably. Everywhere.

Weechat - The extensible chat client.

InspIRCd - A modular C++ IRC server (ircd).

YiffSpot - A real-time web chat for "yiffing" randomly with other furries anonymously.

IRCAnywhere - IRCAnywhere web based multi-user IRC bouncer built for teams

Shout - Deprecated. See fork @ https://github.com/thelounge

ngircd - Free, portable and lightweight Internet Relay Chat server