head to head · open source
Cherry Studio vs aichat
Cherry Studio has 52,003 GitHub stars, 4,978 forks, 1,514 open issues and last shipped today. aichat has 10,459 stars, 745 forks, 104 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Cherry Studio leads on adoption by 397% (52,003 vs 10,459 stars). Cherry Studio is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; aichat is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Cherry Studio has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, aichat 7%. Cherry Studio was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | aichat | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 10K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-02-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 745 |
| 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 aichat if
- You want the aichat feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and aichat 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 aichat
AIChat is an all in one LLM command line tool, written in Rust and licensed under Apache 2.0, that gives developers a shell assistant, an interactive chat REPL, retrieval augmented generation, and AI tools and agents through a single terminal interface to more than twenty language model providers.
read the full aichat overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cherry Studio or aichat more popular?
Cherry Studio has 52,003 GitHub stars and aichat has 10,459. Cherry Studio has the larger community by that measure.
Are Cherry Studio and aichat free?
Both are open source. Cherry Studio is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and aichat under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Cherry Studio and aichat?
Cherry Studio is written in TypeScript and aichat in Rust. 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 aichat?
Choose Cherry Studio if you want the larger community (52,003 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose aichat if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.