head to head · open source
herdr vs Trail-Code
herdr has 43,871 GitHub stars, 3,461 forks, 337 open issues and last shipped today. Trail-Code has 9,977 stars, 882 forks, 243 open issues and last shipped yesterday. herdr leads on adoption by 340% (43,871 vs 9,977 stars). herdr is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; Trail-Code is written in TypeScript under MIT. herdr has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, Trail-Code 9%. herdr 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 | Trail-Code | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 10.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-14 | 2026-10-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.5K | ⑂ 882 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick herdr if
- You weight community size — 44K 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 Trail-Code if
- You want the Trail-Code feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Trail-Code 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 Trail-Code
Trail Code is an MIT licensed TypeScript CLI and MCP server that hands coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and Gemini a graph of your codebase together with a repo committed record of what previous sessions worked out, so teams stop re explaining the same code to the same agent.
read the full Trail-Code overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is herdr or Trail-Code more popular?
herdr has 43,871 GitHub stars and Trail-Code has 9,977. herdr has the larger community by that measure.
Are herdr and Trail-Code free?
Both are open source. herdr is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Trail-Code under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between herdr and Trail-Code?
herdr is written in Rust and Trail-Code 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 Trail-Code?
Choose herdr if you want the larger community (43,871 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Trail-Code if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.