Comparisons
Vulos, next to the web desktops
People arrive at Vulos after looking at OS.js or Puter, which is fair — all three put a desktop in your browser. But there is a real category difference underneath, and it is worth naming before anything else.
The category difference
OS.js and Puter are web desktops. They present a desktop in a browser tab, and they run on top of a server and an operating system you already have. That is a good design: it means they install next to your other software, and it means you can try them without changing anything about your machine.
Vulos is an operating system for a box you own. It boots the machine. It owns the disk, the boot chain and the network namespaces the apps run in. The browser desktop is how you reach it, not what it is. That buys a different kind of guarantee — the machine your work lives on is one you can open, read and replace — and it costs you a whole machine to get.
Neither shape is better in the abstract. The two pages below try to make the trade concrete, including the places where Vulos is the weaker choice.
The comparisons
Vulos as an OS.js alternative
OS.js is a BSD-2 licensed JavaScript web desktop that runs on a Node server — small, permissive, and built around adapter seams for storage and identity you already run. Where that is the right answer, and where a whole OS is.
Read the comparison →Puter alternativeVulos as a Puter alternative
Puter is an AGPL-3.0 “internet computer” with a hosted service, an app store and a developer SDK that costs the developer nothing per user. It is the more finished product. What you get instead by running your own box.
Read the comparison →How these pages are written
- Competitor facts come from primary sources only — the project's own site, repository, licence file and documentation. Each page lists what it used.
- Each page carries the date the facts were checked (10 August 2026 for both, at the time of writing), because open-source projects move and a comparison with no date is a comparison you cannot audit.
- Each page says what the other project is good at. If we could not name real strengths, we would not understand the thing well enough to compare against it.
- Each page has a section on where Vulos is weaker. Maturity, ecosystem, and the cost of asking for a whole machine are all real, and they are on the page.
- Claims about Vulos are sourced from our own docs, not from ambition. Where the implementation is narrower than the design — multi-instance sync, for one — the pages say so.