head to head · open source
chatbox vs kotaemon
chatbox has 41,791 GitHub stars, 4,252 forks, 1,290 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. kotaemon has 25,769 stars, 2,156 forks, 247 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. chatbox leads on adoption by 62% (41,791 vs 25,769 stars). chatbox is written in TypeScript under GPL-3.0; kotaemon is written in Python under Apache-2.0. chatbox has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, kotaemon 8%. chatbox was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (chatbot), 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 | kotaemon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 42K | ★ 26K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-07-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| 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 kotaemon if
- You want the kotaemon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and kotaemon 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 kotaemon
kotaemon is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed Python project that provides a clean and customizable retrieval augmented generation (RAG) UI for chatting with documents. It sits in the AI and machine learning ecosystem, specifically under AI interaction and interfaces, and is built on Gradio so that the interface itself can be extended or modified. The README frames the project as serving two distinct audiences at once: end users who want to do question answering over their own files, and developers who want to build their own RAG pipeline on top of the framework.
read the full kotaemon overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is chatbox or kotaemon more popular?
chatbox has 41,791 GitHub stars and kotaemon has 25,769. chatbox has the larger community by that measure.
Are chatbox and kotaemon free?
Both are open source. chatbox is licensed under GPL-3.0 and kotaemon under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between chatbox and kotaemon?
chatbox is written in TypeScript and kotaemon 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, chatbox or kotaemon?
Choose chatbox if you want the larger community (41,791 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose kotaemon if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.