head to head · open source
Cherry Studio vs kotaemon
Cherry Studio has 51,923 GitHub stars, 4,976 forks, 1,514 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kotaemon has 25,769 stars, 2,156 forks, 247 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Cherry Studio leads on adoption by 101% (51,923 vs 25,769 stars). Cherry Studio is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; kotaemon is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Cherry Studio has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, kotaemon 8%. Cherry Studio 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 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Cherry Studio | kotaemon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 26K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-07-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Cherry Studio if
- You weight community size — 52K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick kotaemon if
- You want the kotaemon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and kotaemon fits your workflow better
About Cherry Studio
Cherry Studio is a cross platform desktop application for interacting with large language models, built in TypeScript under the AGPL 3.0 license. It operates in the AI interaction and interfaces ecosystem, providing a unified interface to access cloud hosted models (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic), web services (Claude, Poe, Perplexity), and locally hosted models via Ollama or LM Studio.
read the full Cherry Studio overview →
About kotaemon
kotaemon is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed Python project that provides a clean and customizable retrieval augmented generation (RAG) UI for chatting with documents. It sits in the AI and machine learning ecosystem, specifically under AI interaction and interfaces, and is built on Gradio so that the interface itself can be extended or modified. The README frames the project as serving two distinct audiences at once: end users who want to do question answering over their own files, and developers who want to build their own RAG pipeline on top of the framework.
read the full kotaemon overview →
More in AI & Machine Learning
Related comparisons
More AI Interaction & Interfaces projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the AI Interaction & Interfaces field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Cherry Studio or kotaemon more popular?
Cherry Studio has 51,923 GitHub stars and kotaemon has 25,769. Cherry Studio has the larger community by that measure.
Are Cherry Studio and kotaemon free?
Both are open source. Cherry Studio is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and kotaemon under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Cherry Studio and kotaemon?
Cherry Studio is written in TypeScript and kotaemon 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, Cherry Studio or kotaemon?
Choose Cherry Studio if you want the larger community (51,923 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose kotaemon if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.