head to head · open source
Lago vs Paymenter
Lago has 10,748 GitHub stars, 782 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Paymenter has 2,817 stars, 569 forks, 74 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Lago leads on adoption by 282% (10,748 vs 2,817 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 20%. 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 | Paymenter | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 11K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| 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 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 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 Paymenter
Paymenter Open Source Billing, Built for Hosting Automate subscriptions, eliminate billing chaos, and grow your hosting business – without vendor lock ins or hidden costs. Website · Documentation · Live Demo · Extensions Getting Started Installation & Documentation For a detailed explanation of how to install and configure Paymenter, take a look at our documentation here. Or, get additional help via Community Discord. Requirements The requirements for Paymenter are the following: PHP (8.3 or higher). Composer Webserver (Apache or Nginx) Database (MariaDB) What is Paymenter? Paymenter is an open source billing…
read the full Paymenter overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lago or Paymenter more popular?
Lago has 10,748 GitHub stars and Paymenter has 2,817. 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 (10,748 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Paymenter if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.