head to head · open source
agones vs pitaya
agones has 7,098 GitHub stars, 956 forks, 59 open issues and last shipped today. pitaya has 2,846 stars, 549 forks, 69 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. agones leads on adoption by 149% (7,098 vs 2,846 stars). agones is written in Go under Apache-2.0; pitaya is written in Go under MIT. agones has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, pitaya 19%. 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 | pitaya | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 7.1K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-06 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 956 | ⑂ 549 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick agones if
- You weight community size — 7.1K 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 pitaya if
- You want the pitaya feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and pitaya fits your workflow better
About agones
Agones is a library for hosting, running and scaling dedicated game servers on Kubernetes. Agones, is derived from the Greek word agōn which roughly translates to “contest”, “competition at games” and “gathering”. (source) Why does this project exist? Agones replaces usual bespoke or proprietary cluster management and game server scaling solutions with a Kubernetes cluster that includes the Agones custom Kubernetes Controller and matching Custom Resource Definitions for GameServers , Fleets and more. With Agones, Kubernetes gets native abilities to create, run, manage and scale dedicated game server processes…
read the full agones overview →
About pitaya
pitaya [![Build Status][7]][8] [![Coverage Status][9]][10] [![GoDoc][1]][2] [![Docs][11]][12] [![Go Report Card][3]][4] [![MIT licensed][5]][6] [1]: [2]: [3]: [4]: [5]: [6]: LICENSE [7]: [8]: [9]: [10]: [11]: [12]: Pitaya is an simple, fast and lightweight game server framework with clustering support and client libraries for iOS, Android, Unity and others through the C SDK. It provides a basic development framework for distributed multiplayer games and server side applications. Getting Started Prerequisites Go = 1.16 etcd (optional, used for service discovery) nats (optional, used for sending and receiving rpc)…
read the full pitaya overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is agones or pitaya more popular?
agones has 7,098 GitHub stars and pitaya has 2,846. agones has the larger community by that measure.
Are agones and pitaya free?
Both are open source. agones is licensed under Apache-2.0 and pitaya under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between agones and pitaya?
agones is written in Go and pitaya 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, agones or pitaya?
Choose agones if you want the larger community (7,098 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pitaya if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.