head to head · open source
agones vs pinus
agones has 7,048 GitHub stars, 945 forks, 59 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. pinus has 1,932 stars, 392 forks, 34 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. agones leads on adoption by 265% (7,048 vs 1,932 stars). agones is written in Go under Apache-2.0; pinus is written in JavaScript under MIT. agones has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, pinus 20%. 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-server), 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
| agones | pinus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 7.0K | ★ 1.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-24 | 2026-07-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 945 | ⑂ 392 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick agones if
- You weight community size — 7.0K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick pinus if
- You want the pinus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and pinus fits your workflow better
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 →
About pinus
Pinus is a fast, scalable, distributed game server framework for Node.js, written in TypeScript and intended for developers building multiplayer games and real time applications such as chat and message push.
read the full pinus overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is agones or pinus more popular?
agones has 7,048 GitHub stars and pinus has 1,932. agones has the larger community by that measure.
Are agones and pinus free?
Both are open source. agones is licensed under Apache-2.0 and pinus under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between agones and pinus?
agones is written in Go and pinus in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, agones or pinus?
Choose agones if you want the larger community (7,048 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pinus if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.