head to head · open source
agones vs pitaya
agones has 7,040 GitHub stars, 944 forks, 59 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pitaya has 2,829 stars, 545 forks, 69 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. agones leads on adoption by 149% (7,040 vs 2,829 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 | ★ 7.0K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-21 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 944 | ⑂ 545 |
| 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 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 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 pitaya
Pitaya is an open source, MIT licensed game server framework written in Go that provides clustering support and client libraries for iOS, Android, Unity and other platforms through a shared C SDK, aimed at teams building distributed multiplayer games and other server side applications.
read the full pitaya overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is agones or pitaya more popular?
agones has 7,040 GitHub stars and pitaya has 2,829. 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 (7,040 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pitaya if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.