head to head · open source
Lago vs Paymenter
Lago has 10,568 GitHub stars, 750 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Paymenter has 2,307 stars, 494 forks, 74 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lago leads on adoption by 358% (10,568 vs 2,307 stars). Lago is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; Paymenter is written in PHP under MIT. Lago has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, Paymenter 21%. Paymenter 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 | Paymenter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 2.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 750 | ⑂ 494 |
| 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 Paymenter if
- You want the Paymenter feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and Paymenter 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 Paymenter
Paymenter is a free and open source billing platform built for hosting companies, distributed under the MIT license. It is a PHP application in the Laravel ecosystem, running on PHP 8.3 or higher with Composer, a web server such as Apache or Nginx, and a MariaDB database. The project describes itself as a webshop solution for hostings, combining subscription billing with a customer facing storefront and an administrative back end in a single codebase. Development is community driven, with documentation, a live demo, and an extensions directory published at paymenter.org.
read the full Paymenter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lago or Paymenter more popular?
Lago has 10,568 GitHub stars and Paymenter has 2,307. Lago has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lago and Paymenter free?
Both are open source. Lago is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Paymenter under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lago and Paymenter?
Lago is written in Go and Paymenter in PHP. 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 Paymenter?
Choose Lago if you want the larger community (10,568 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Paymenter if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.