head to head · open source
Cherry Studio vs chatbox
Cherry Studio has 51,923 GitHub stars, 4,976 forks, 1,514 open issues and last shipped yesterday. chatbox has 41,791 stars, 4,252 forks, 1,290 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Cherry Studio leads on adoption by 24% (51,923 vs 41,791 stars). Cherry Studio is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; chatbox is written in TypeScript under GPL-3.0. Cherry Studio has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, chatbox 10%. Cherry Studio was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (claude-code, deepseek), 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
| Cherry Studio | chatbox | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 42K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 4.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Cherry Studio if
- You weight community size — 52K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick chatbox if
- You want the chatbox feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and chatbox fits your workflow better
About Cherry Studio
Cherry Studio is a cross platform desktop application for interacting with large language models, built in TypeScript under the AGPL 3.0 license. It operates in the AI interaction and interfaces ecosystem, providing a unified interface to access cloud hosted models (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic), web services (Claude, Poe, Perplexity), and locally hosted models via Ollama or LM Studio.
read the full Cherry Studio overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cherry Studio or chatbox more popular?
Cherry Studio has 51,923 GitHub stars and chatbox has 41,791. Cherry Studio has the larger community by that measure.
Are Cherry Studio and chatbox free?
Both are open source. Cherry Studio is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and chatbox under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Cherry Studio and chatbox?
Cherry Studio is written in TypeScript and chatbox 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, Cherry Studio or chatbox?
Choose Cherry Studio if you want the larger community (51,923 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose chatbox if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.