head to head · open source
LobeChat vs kotaemon
LobeChat has 82,547 GitHub stars, 15,891 forks, 922 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kotaemon has 25,769 stars, 2,156 forks, 247 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. LobeChat leads on adoption by 220% (82,547 vs 25,769 stars). LobeChat is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; kotaemon is written in Python under Apache-2.0. LobeChat has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, kotaemon 8%. LobeChat 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.
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Side by side
| LobeChat | kotaemon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 83K | ★ 26K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-07-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 16K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick LobeChat if
- You weight community size — 83K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other 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 LobeChat
LobeHub is an open source platform for managing, building, and operating AI agent teams. It functions as a Chief Agent Operator (CAO), enabling users to organize, schedule, and monitor autonomous AI agents around the clock. The project lives in the AI interaction and interfaces ecosystem, integrating with major LLM providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and Alibaba’s GLM series.
read the full LobeChat 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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is LobeChat or kotaemon more popular?
LobeChat has 82,547 GitHub stars and kotaemon has 25,769. LobeChat has the larger community by that measure.
Are LobeChat and kotaemon free?
Both are open source. LobeChat has no licence declared in this registry, and kotaemon is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between LobeChat and kotaemon?
LobeChat 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, LobeChat or kotaemon?
Choose LobeChat if you want the larger community (82,547 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose kotaemon if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.