head to head · open source
MonoGame vs agones
MonoGame has 14,433 GitHub stars, 3,108 forks, 766 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. agones has 7,032 stars, 943 forks, 59 open issues and last shipped today. MonoGame leads on adoption by 105% (14,433 vs 7,032 stars). MonoGame is written in C# under a custom or non-standard licence; agones is written in Go under Apache-2.0. MonoGame has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, agones 13%. agones was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (game-development), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| MonoGame | agones | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 14K | ★ 7.0K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C# | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 943 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick MonoGame if
- You weight community size — 14K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick agones if
- You want the agones feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and agones fits your workflow better
About MonoGame
MonoGame is a free, open source C and .NET game framework for building cross platform games. It lives in the .NET game development ecosystem and is positioned as one framework for creating games on desktop PCs, mobile devices, and consoles. It is an open source re implementation of Microsoft's discontinued XNA Framework, used to create games such as Streets of Rage 4, Carrion, Celeste, and Stardew Valley.
read the full MonoGame overview →
About agones
Agones is an open source library for hosting, running and scaling dedicated game servers on Kubernetes, built for game developers, platform engineers and live ops teams that need multiplayer server capacity without bespoke cluster management.
read the full agones overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is MonoGame or agones more popular?
MonoGame has 14,433 GitHub stars and agones has 7,032. MonoGame has the larger community by that measure.
Are MonoGame and agones free?
Both are open source. MonoGame has no licence declared in this registry, and agones is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between MonoGame and agones?
MonoGame is written in C# and agones in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, MonoGame or agones?
Choose MonoGame if you want the larger community (14,433 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose agones if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.