head to head · open source
Lago vs Bigcapital
Lago has 10,748 GitHub stars, 782 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Bigcapital has 4,040 stars, 569 forks, 214 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lago leads on adoption by 166% (10,748 vs 4,040 stars). Lago is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; Bigcapital is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. Lago has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, Bigcapital 14%. Bigcapital was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (payments), 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
| Lago | Bigcapital | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 4.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 782 | ⑂ 569 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lago if
- You weight community size — 11K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Bigcapital if
- You want the Bigcapital feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Bigcapital fits your workflow better
About Lago
Lago Agentic first, open source monetization infrastructure for AI products Meter tokens, compute, API calls, or any product usage. Turn usage into pricing, credits, entitlements, invoices, payments, and revenue. Use Lago Direct for your own product, or Lago Embedded to power monetization for your customers. Run the AI billing demo · Documentation · Talk to us about Lago Cloud “Lago has been able to follow the pace of our releases and has allowed us to focus on what we do best.” Timothée Lacroix, CTO at Mistral AI · Read the customer story See Lago price an AI workload Run the maintained demo from this…
About Bigcapital
Simple, smart online accounting software for small and medium businesses. Bigcapital Cloud What's Bigcapital? Bigcapital is a smart and open source accounting and inventory software, Bigcapital keeps all business finances in right place and automates accounting processes to give the business powerful and intelligent financial statements and reports to help in making decisions. Getting Started We've got serveral options on dev and prod depending on your need to get started quickly with Bigcapital. Self hosted Bigcapital is available open source under AGPL license. You can host it on your own servers using Docker…
read the full Bigcapital overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lago or Bigcapital more popular?
Lago has 10,748 GitHub stars and Bigcapital has 4,040. Lago has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lago and Bigcapital free?
Both are open source. Lago is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Bigcapital under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lago and Bigcapital?
Lago is written in Go and Bigcapital 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, Lago or Bigcapital?
Choose Lago if you want the larger community (10,748 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Bigcapital if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.