head to head · open source
pi vs caveman
pi has 110,812 GitHub stars, 14,094 forks, 202 open issues and last shipped today. caveman has 108,615 stars, 6,296 forks, 155 open issues and last shipped today. pi leads on adoption by 2% (110,812 vs 108,615 stars). pi is written in TypeScript under MIT; caveman is written in Go under Apache-2.0. pi has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, caveman 6%. caveman was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| pi | caveman | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 111K | ★ 109K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-01 | 2026-10-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 14K | ⑂ 6.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick pi if
- You weight community size — 111K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick caveman if
- You want the caveman 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 caveman fits your workflow better
About pi
Pi is a modular agent toolkit written in TypeScript for building and running terminal based AI coding agents. It lives in the developer tooling ecosystem and provides composable packages for LLM integration, agent orchestration, and terminal UI rendering. The project centers on @earendil works/pi coding agent , an interactive CLI agent, supported by core runtime, AI abstraction, and TUI libraries.
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…
read the full caveman overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is pi or caveman more popular?
pi has 110,812 GitHub stars and caveman has 108,615. pi has the larger community by that measure.
Are pi and caveman free?
Both are open source. pi is licensed under MIT and caveman under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between pi and caveman?
pi is written in TypeScript and caveman 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, pi or caveman?
Choose pi if you want the larger community (110,812 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose caveman if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.