head to head · open source
Lago vs hledger
Lago has 10,568 GitHub stars, 750 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped yesterday. hledger has 4,709 stars, 414 forks, 328 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lago leads on adoption by 124% (10,568 vs 4,709 stars). Lago is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; hledger is written in Haskell under GPL-3.0. Lago has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, hledger 9%. hledger 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 | hledger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 4.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Haskell |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 750 | ⑂ 414 |
| 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 hledger if
- You want the hledger feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Haskell
- You evaluated both and hledger 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 hledger
hledger is lightweight, cross platform, multi currency, double entry accounting software that stores all data in a plain text journal format. It lives in the Plain Text Accounting ecosystem, a community of tools and practices built around the plaintextaccounting.org project, and it is inspired by and partly compatible with Ledger CLI, with Beancount files interconvertible as well. The project is written in Haskell, licensed under GPL 3.0 or later, has been developed since 2007, and offers command line, terminal, web, mobile, and editor/IDE interfaces.
read the full hledger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lago or hledger more popular?
Lago has 10,568 GitHub stars and hledger has 4,709. Lago has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lago and hledger free?
Both are open source. Lago is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and hledger under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lago and hledger?
Lago is written in Go and hledger in Haskell. 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 hledger?
Choose Lago if you want the larger community (10,568 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose hledger if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.