head to head · open source
shannon vs giskard-oss
shannon has 48,205 GitHub stars, 5,529 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. giskard-oss has 5,830 stars, 537 forks, 64 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. shannon leads on adoption by 727% (48,205 vs 5,830 stars). shannon is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; giskard-oss is written in Python under Apache-2.0. shannon has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, giskard-oss 9%. giskard-oss was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-security), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| shannon | giskard-oss | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 5.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-08 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.5K | ⑂ 537 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick shannon if
- You weight community size — 48K 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 giskard-oss if
- You want the giskard-oss 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 giskard-oss fits your workflow better
About shannon
Shannon is an autonomous AI pentester for web applications and APIs that reads an application's source code, identifies attack paths, and executes real exploits so that only vulnerabilities with a working proof of concept are reported, built for AppSec, DevSecOps, and security engineering teams that ship code continuously.
read the full shannon overview →
About giskard-oss
Giskard OSS is an open source Python library for evaluating, red teaming and testing LLM agents and RAG pipelines, built for developers, ML engineers and AI security teams that need reproducible checks on non deterministic systems.
read the full giskard-oss overview →
More in AI & Machine Learning
Related comparisons
More AI Security & Privacy projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the AI Security & Privacy field.
Frequently asked questions
Is shannon or giskard-oss more popular?
shannon has 48,205 GitHub stars and giskard-oss has 5,830. shannon has the larger community by that measure.
Are shannon and giskard-oss free?
Both are open source. shannon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and giskard-oss under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between shannon and giskard-oss?
shannon is written in TypeScript and giskard-oss 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, shannon or giskard-oss?
Choose shannon if you want the larger community (48,205 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose giskard-oss if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.