head to head · open source
caveman vs SWE-agent
caveman has 108,615 GitHub stars, 6,296 forks, 155 open issues and last shipped today. SWE-agent has 20,449 stars, 2,245 forks, 102 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. caveman leads on adoption by 431% (108,615 vs 20,449 stars). caveman is written in Go under Apache-2.0; SWE-agent is written in Python under MIT. caveman has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, SWE-agent 11%. caveman was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ai, 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 | SWE-agent | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 109K | ★ 20K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-01 | 2026-09-28 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.3K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick caveman if
- You weight community size — 109K 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 SWE-agent if
- You want the SWE-agent feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and SWE-agent 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…
read the full caveman overview →
About SWE-agent
SWE agent is a Python, MIT licensed open source project in the AI assisted coding and agent ecosystem. It is an agent based model for developer tools that takes a GitHub issue and tries to automatically fix it using a chosen language model. The project is associated with NeurIPS 2024 and is maintained by researchers from Princeton University and Stanford University.
read the full SWE-agent overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is caveman or SWE-agent more popular?
caveman has 108,615 GitHub stars and SWE-agent has 20,449. caveman has the larger community by that measure.
Are caveman and SWE-agent free?
Both are open source. caveman is licensed under Apache-2.0 and SWE-agent under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between caveman and SWE-agent?
caveman is written in Go and SWE-agent in Python. 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 SWE-agent?
Choose caveman if you want the larger community (108,615 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose SWE-agent if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.