head to head · open source
effect vs cost-xray
effect has 17,476 GitHub stars, 895 forks, 253 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cost-xray has 5,814 stars, 375 forks, 13 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. effect leads on adoption by 201% (17,476 vs 5,814 stars). effect is written in TypeScript under MIT; cost-xray is written in Python under MIT. effect has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, cost-xray 6%. effect was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (observability), 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
| effect | cost-xray | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 5.8K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 895 | ⑂ 375 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick effect if
- You weight community size — 17K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cost-xray if
- You want the cost-xray feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and cost-xray fits your workflow better
About effect
Effect Effect is a library for building robust, maintainable, type safe, and production grade applications in TypeScript. It helps you handle the hard problems at scale: typed errors, dependency injection, structured concurrency, scheduling, tracing, and unified schema validation. Effect V4 is currently a release candidate. The main branch contains v4 development. Install V4 RC Requirements TypeScript 5.9 or newer. TypeScript 7 is recommended for the best performance and compatibility with Effect's TypeScript tooling. Node.js 18 or newer is the general minimum for running Effect on Node.js. Some integration…
read the full effect overview →
About cost-xray
cost xray See what your AI coding agent actually sends to the API — and what each part costs. Most usage tools read local logs. That shows the total cost of a call or session, but it misses the request time context assembled before the model is invoked: system prompts, tool schemas, MCP blocks, tool results, cache reads/writes, and previous thinking blocks. cost xray captures the actual local API traffic for Claude Code and Codex, then attributes tokens and dollars back to the sources inside the request. It shows not just how much a turn cost, but why it cost that much. Home — every session by agent · project ·…
read the full cost-xray overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is effect or cost-xray more popular?
effect has 17,476 GitHub stars and cost-xray has 5,814. effect has the larger community by that measure.
Are effect and cost-xray free?
Both are open source. effect is licensed under MIT and cost-xray under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between effect and cost-xray?
effect is written in TypeScript and cost-xray 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, effect or cost-xray?
Choose effect if you want the larger community (17,476 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cost-xray if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.