Drift vs paste
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted pastebins & snippets options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Drift | paste |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 18 · At risk | 14 · At risk |
| Category | Pastebins & Snippets | Pastebins & Snippets |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Language | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Setup difficulty | Medium | Easy |
| Min. RAM | 512 MB | 64 MB |
| Deployment | docker, bare-metal | docker, binary, bare-metal |
| GitHub stars | ★ 1,364 | ★ 574 |
| First released | 2022 | 2018 |
| Replaces | GitHub Gist | Pastebin.com, GitHub Gist |
What are Drift and paste?
Drift
Drift is a self-hostable pastebin and snippet manager that serves as a Gist alternative. It offers multi-file pastes, a polished editor, expiration, and visibility controls.
- Multi-file pastes
- Polished editor
- Visibility controls
- Gist-like experience
paste
paste is a minimalist, self-hosted pastebin service written in Go that stores text snippets and returns short URLs. It is designed to be tiny, dependency-free, and easy to run from a single binary.
- Single static binary
- Filesystem-based storage
- Short URL generation
- Simple HTTP API
Drift vs paste: key differences
Drift is written in TypeScript, while paste is built with JavaScript. Licensing differs — AGPL-3.0 for Drift versus MIT for paste. Paste is the lighter option, starting around 64 MB of RAM against 512 MB for Drift. Paste is the more established project (first released 2018), while Drift arrived in 2022. Drift has the considerably larger community, at 1,364 GitHub stars versus 574.
Why pick each one
Choose Drift if…
- Released under the AGPL-3.0 license
- First-class Docker support for quick deployment
- Active community (1.4k GitHub stars)
- Written in TypeScript
Choose paste if…
- Extremely lightweight
- Trivial to deploy
Watch out for
- Very minimal feature set
- No syntax highlighting UI
Frequently asked questions
Is Drift or paste better?
Neither is universally better. Drift has the larger community, while paste is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Drift and paste free and open-source?
Yes. Drift is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and paste under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Drift and paste with Docker?
Drift: yes. paste: yes.
Which is lighter on resources, Drift or paste?
paste has the smaller minimum footprint at 64 MB of RAM, compared to about 512 MB for Drift. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.