head to head · open source
Khoj vs vnote
Khoj has 37,970 GitHub stars, 2,530 forks, 148 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. vnote has 13,030 stars, 1,295 forks, 270 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Khoj leads on adoption by 191% (37,970 vs 13,030 stars). Khoj is written in Python under AGPL-3.0; vnote is written in C++ under LGPL-3.0. Khoj has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, vnote 10%. vnote was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Khoj | vnote | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 38K | ★ 13K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-08-02 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.5K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Khoj if
- You weight community size — 38K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick vnote if
- You want the vnote feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and vnote fits your workflow better
About Khoj
Your AI second brain 📑 Docs • 🌐 Web • 🔥 App • 💬 Discord • ✍🏽 Blog 🎁 New Meet 🌶️ Pipali our open source AI coworker that runs on your computer. Read about Khoj's excellent performance on modern retrieval and reasoning benchmarks. Overview Khoj is a personal AI app to extend your capabilities. It smoothly scales up from an on device personal AI to a cloud scale enterprise AI. Chat with any local or online LLM (e.g llama3, qwen, gemma, mistral, gpt, claude, gemini, deepseek). Get answers from the internet and your docs (including image, pdf, markdown, org mode, word, notion files). Access it from your…
About vnote
VNote 简体中文 Project on Gitee A pleasant note taking platform. For more information, please visit VNote's Home Page . Description VNote is a Qt based, free and open source note taking application, focusing on Markdown now. VNote is designed to provide a pleasant note taking platform with excellent editing experience. VNote is NOT just a simple editor for Markdown. By providing notes management, VNote makes taking notes in Markdown simpler. In the future, VNote will support more formats besides Markdown. Utilizing Qt, VNote could run on Linux , Windows , and macOS . Downloads Continuous builds on master branch…
read the full vnote overview →
More in Productivity & Utilities
Related comparisons
More Note Taking & Knowledge Management projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Note Taking & Knowledge Management field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Khoj or vnote more popular?
Khoj has 37,970 GitHub stars and vnote has 13,030. Khoj has the larger community by that measure.
Are Khoj and vnote free?
Both are open source. Khoj is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and vnote under LGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Khoj and vnote?
Khoj is written in Python and vnote in C++. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Khoj or vnote?
Choose Khoj if you want the larger community (37,970 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose vnote if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.