head to head · open source
headroom vs sepia
headroom has 78,845 GitHub stars, 6,162 forks, 643 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sepia has 3,638 stars, 226 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. headroom leads on adoption by 2,067% (78,845 vs 3,638 stars). headroom is written in Python under Apache-2.0; sepia is written in Python under MIT. headroom has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, sepia 6%. headroom was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (claude-code, llm), 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
| headroom | sepia | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 79K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 226 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick headroom if
- You weight community size — 79K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick sepia if
- You want the sepia feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and sepia fits your workflow better
About headroom
Quickstart · Install · Proof · Agents · Docs · Discord · llms.txt AI agents / LLMs: read /llms.txt here, or fetch the live index · full docs blob . Headroom compresses everything your AI agent reads — tool outputs, logs, RAG chunks, files, and conversation history — before it reaches the LLM. Same answers, fraction of the tokens. Compression runs on your machine; no prompt or file content is sent anywhere to be compressed. 10,144 → 1,260 tokens. The same FATAL found. What it does Library — compress(messages) in Python or TypeScript, inline in any app. Proxy — headroom proxy port 8787 , zero code changes, any…
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About sepia
sepia English 繁體中文 简体中文 De AI writing at the layer that actually gives AI away. Fiction gets its narrative architecture repaired before anyone touches word choice; professional documents (release notes, PR replies, postmortems, tickets, technical articles) each get rules matched to their venue. A portable Agent Skill: any agent that speaks the standard can load it, and the Skills CLI, which supports 77+ agents, installs it with one command. Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, Antigravity, and QwenPaw additionally get native plugin packaging. One canonical SKILL.md , no per platform forks. Four operations: write…
read the full sepia overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is headroom or sepia more popular?
headroom has 78,845 GitHub stars and sepia has 3,638. headroom has the larger community by that measure.
Are headroom and sepia free?
Both are open source. headroom is licensed under Apache-2.0 and sepia under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between headroom and sepia?
headroom is written in Python and sepia 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, headroom or sepia?
Choose headroom if you want the larger community (78,845 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose sepia if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.