head to head · open source
chatbox vs python-telegram-bot
chatbox has 41,814 GitHub stars, 4,253 forks, 1,290 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. python-telegram-bot has 29,483 stars, 6,152 forks, 31 open issues and last shipped today. chatbox leads on adoption by 42% (41,814 vs 29,483 stars). chatbox is written in TypeScript under GPL-3.0; python-telegram-bot is written in Python under GPL-3.0. chatbox has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, python-telegram-bot 21%. python-telegram-bot 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 | python-telegram-bot | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 42K | ★ 29K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 6.2K |
| 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 python-telegram-bot if
- You want the python-telegram-bot feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and python-telegram-bot 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 python-telegram-bot
python telegram bot is a pure Python, asynchronous wrapper around the Telegram Bot API, distributed as the python telegram bot package on PyPI and developed in the open under the copyright holder's GPL listing. It lives in the Python ecosystem and targets Python 3.10 and newer. The repository carries the topics bot, chatbot, framework, python and telegram, and the project has been maintained for roughly eleven years. Its tagline, "We have made you a wrapper you can't refuse", is the project's own framing of the role it plays: a library that sits between a Python program and Telegram's servers.…
read the full python-telegram-bot overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is chatbox or python-telegram-bot more popular?
chatbox has 41,814 GitHub stars and python-telegram-bot has 29,483. chatbox has the larger community by that measure.
Are chatbox and python-telegram-bot free?
Both are open source. chatbox is licensed under GPL-3.0 and python-telegram-bot under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between chatbox and python-telegram-bot?
chatbox is written in TypeScript and python-telegram-bot 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 python-telegram-bot?
Choose chatbox if you want the larger community (41,814 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose python-telegram-bot if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.