head to head · open source
Lago vs budget-board
Lago has 10,568 GitHub stars, 750 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped yesterday. budget-board has 884 stars, 63 forks, 11 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lago leads on adoption by 1,095% (10,568 vs 884 stars). Lago is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; budget-board is written in C# under AGPL-3.0. Lago has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, budget-board 7%. Lago 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
| Lago | budget-board | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 884 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | C# |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 750 | ⑂ 63 |
| 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 budget-board if
- You want the budget-board feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and budget-board fits your workflow better
About Lago
Lago is an open source metering and usage based billing API written in Go under AGPL 3.0. It lives in the Business Software and Finance & Accounting ecosystem and sits between product usage and revenue. It turns events such as AI tokens, compute, API calls, seats, and custom events into billable metrics, pricing, credits, entitlements, invoices, and payments.
About budget-board
Budget Board is a self hosted personal finance application for tracking monthly spending and working towards financial goals. It is written in C and built on ASP.NET with a ReactJS front end, and it lives in the .NET ecosystem as a container friendly web application released under the AGPL 3.0 license. The project has been on GitHub for six years, holds 884 stars and 63 forks, and its public documentation and wiki are hosted at budgetboard.net.
read the full budget-board overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lago or budget-board more popular?
Lago has 10,568 GitHub stars and budget-board has 884. Lago has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lago and budget-board free?
Both are open source. Lago is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and budget-board under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lago and budget-board?
Lago is written in Go and budget-board 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, Lago or budget-board?
Choose Lago if you want the larger community (10,568 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose budget-board if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.