head to head · open source
herdr vs rea
herdr has 42,951 GitHub stars, 3,366 forks, 337 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rea has 29,472 stars, 3,500 forks, 70 open issues and last shipped today. herdr leads on adoption by 46% (42,951 vs 29,472 stars). herdr is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; rea is written in TypeScript under MIT. herdr has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, rea 12%. rea was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (ai-agents, claude-code, cli, codex), 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 | rea | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 43K | ★ 29K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-08 | 2026-10-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.4K | ⑂ 3.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick herdr if
- You weight community size — 43K 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 rea if
- You want the rea feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and rea 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 rea
REA is an open source MCP server and CLI that lets AI coding agents — and your terminal — reverse engineer native binaries, JavaScript and Electron apps, .NET assemblies, and websites, with evidence attached to every conclusion.
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Frequently asked questions
Is herdr or rea more popular?
herdr has 42,951 GitHub stars and rea has 29,472. herdr has the larger community by that measure.
Are herdr and rea free?
Both are open source. herdr is licensed under Apache-2.0 and rea under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between herdr and rea?
herdr is written in Rust and rea in TypeScript. 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 rea?
Choose herdr if you want the larger community (42,951 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose rea if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.