head to head · open source
caveman vs OpenHands
caveman has 120,139 GitHub stars, 7,002 forks, 155 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenHands has 93,485 stars, 12,514 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped today. caveman leads on adoption by 29% (120,139 vs 93,485 stars). caveman is written in Go under Apache-2.0; OpenHands is written in TypeScript under MIT. caveman has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, OpenHands 13%. OpenHands was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (llm), 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
| caveman | OpenHands | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 120K | ★ 93K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-14 | 2026-11-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.0K | ⑂ 13K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick caveman if
- You weight community size — 120K 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 OpenHands if
- You want the OpenHands feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and OpenHands fits your workflow better
About caveman
why use many token when few do trick Your AI coding agent bills by the word and writes like it knows that. Caveman make it stop. ▶️ ThePrimeagen reacts: "No way this actually works" 🏆 1 on GitHub Trending · July 2026 · 🥇 1 Repository of the Day on Trendshift · April 2026 1 on Hacker News · 904 points · 366 comments · 8 Product of the Day on Product Hunt 📄 Cited in CAVEWOMAN , an Adobe Research paper that measured caveman style output cutting cost 1.4 to 2.4×, up to 3× · 🧪 Tested by JetBrains on 86 real coding tasks: "costs you nothing measurable in quality" ⚡ One command, no account, no API key. npx skills…
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About OpenHands
Agent Canvas The self hosted developer control center for coding agents and automations. Run OpenHands, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or any ACP compatible agent across local, remote, and cloud backends. Quickstart Docs Self Hosting ACP Agents Automations Slack OpenHands Agent Canvas turns your coding agents into a self hosted, always on engineering team. It's a developer control center for starting conversations and automating everyday tasks — like generating reports that publish to Slack or automatically decomposing GitHub issues into tasks. It runs locally on your machine by default, but can connect to multiple…
read the full OpenHands overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is caveman or OpenHands more popular?
caveman has 120,139 GitHub stars and OpenHands has 93,485. caveman has the larger community by that measure.
Are caveman and OpenHands free?
Both are open source. caveman is licensed under Apache-2.0 and OpenHands under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between caveman and OpenHands?
caveman is written in Go and OpenHands in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, caveman or OpenHands?
Choose caveman if you want the larger community (120,139 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose OpenHands if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.