head to head · open source
chatbox vs aidea
chatbox has 41,814 GitHub stars, 4,253 forks, 1,290 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. aidea has 6,932 stars, 1,043 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. chatbox leads on adoption by 503% (41,814 vs 6,932 stars). chatbox is written in TypeScript under GPL-3.0; aidea is written in Dart under MIT. chatbox has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, aidea 15%. chatbox was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (chatbot, gpt), 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
| chatbox | aidea | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 42K | ★ 6.9K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Dart |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-03-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 1.0K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick chatbox if
- You weight community size — 42K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick aidea if
- You want the aidea feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Dart
- You evaluated both and aidea fits your workflow better
About chatbox
Chatbox (Community Edition) is a cross platform desktop client for large language models, written in TypeScript and released under the GPL 3.0 license. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and it connects to a range of providers including OpenAI (ChatGPT), Azure OpenAI, Claude, Google Gemini Pro, Ollama and ChatGLM 6B. The project lives in the AI interaction and interfaces ecosystem, where desktop chat front ends sit between a user and one or more hosted or locally hosted model APIs. The repository carries 41,767 stars and 4,251 forks across four years of history.
read the full chatbox overview →
About aidea
AIdea is an MIT licensed, open source Flutter application that gathers mainstream large language models and image generation models behind one interface, built both for end users who want a single chat and image client and for operators who would rather run that client on their own infrastructure than depend on a managed cloud service.
read the full aidea overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is chatbox or aidea more popular?
chatbox has 41,814 GitHub stars and aidea has 6,932. chatbox has the larger community by that measure.
Are chatbox and aidea free?
Both are open source. chatbox is licensed under GPL-3.0 and aidea under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between chatbox and aidea?
chatbox is written in TypeScript and aidea in Dart. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, chatbox or aidea?
Choose chatbox if you want the larger community (41,814 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose aidea if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.