head to head · open source
herdr vs moai-adk
herdr has 40,644 GitHub stars, 3,107 forks, 337 open issues and last shipped yesterday. moai-adk has 1,220 stars, 226 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped today. herdr leads on adoption by 3,231% (40,644 vs 1,220 stars). herdr is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; moai-adk is written in Go under Apache-2.0. herdr has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, moai-adk 19%. moai-adk was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (claude-code), 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
| herdr | moai-adk | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 41K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-24 | 2026-09-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 226 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick herdr if
- You weight community size — 41K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick moai-adk if
- You want the moai-adk feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and moai-adk fits your workflow better
About herdr
herdr is a terminal first runtime for coding agents — a single Rust binary that owns the terminals in which tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode and Grok run, aimed at developers who keep agents working across local and remote machines and want those sessions to survive a lost SSH connection or a closed client.
read the full herdr overview →
About moai-adk
moai adk is an open source, Apache 2.0 agentic development harness for Claude Code, distributed as a single Go binary, that imposes SPEC driven structure, quality gates, and per column model routing on AI written code so that developers and teams can trust what the agent produces.
read the full moai-adk overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is herdr or moai-adk more popular?
herdr has 40,644 GitHub stars and moai-adk has 1,220. herdr has the larger community by that measure.
Are herdr and moai-adk free?
Both are open source. herdr is licensed under Apache-2.0 and moai-adk under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between herdr and moai-adk?
herdr is written in Rust and moai-adk in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, herdr or moai-adk?
Choose herdr if you want the larger community (40,644 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose moai-adk if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.