head to head · open source
langchain vs openscience
langchain has 148,892 GitHub stars, 25,031 forks, 492 open issues and last shipped yesterday. openscience has 4,325 stars, 545 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. langchain leads on adoption by 3,343% (148,892 vs 4,325 stars). langchain is written in Python under MIT; openscience is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. langchain has attracted 17% as many forks as stars, openscience 13%. langchain was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai), 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
| langchain | openscience | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 149K | ★ 4.3K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 25K | ⑂ 545 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick langchain if
- You weight community size — 149K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick openscience if
- You want the openscience feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and openscience fits your workflow better
About langchain
The agent engineering platform. LangChain is a framework for building agents and LLM powered applications. It helps you chain together interoperable components and third party integrations to simplify AI application development — all while future proofing decisions as the underlying technology evolves. [!TIP] Just getting started? Check out Deep Agents — a higher level package built on LangChain for agents that have built in capabilities for common usage patterns such as planning, subagents, file system usage, and more. Quickstart If you're looking for more advanced customization or agent orchestration, check…
read the full langchain overview →
About openscience
The open source AI workbench for scientific research. Give it a goal. It reads the literature, writes and runs the code, runs the experiments, and writes up what it found, with every step on the record. Download · Quickstart · Documentation · Changelog · Contributing What it is OpenScience is a research agent with a workbench around it. You describe the task in plain language; it plans, gathers evidence, runs code and experiments, and hands back results you can check. It runs as a desktop app, a browser workspace, or a terminal command, on your machine, against your files. It is built for the parts of research…
read the full openscience overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is langchain or openscience more popular?
langchain has 148,892 GitHub stars and openscience has 4,325. langchain has the larger community by that measure.
Are langchain and openscience free?
Both are open source. langchain is licensed under MIT and openscience under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between langchain and openscience?
langchain is written in Python and openscience 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, langchain or openscience?
Choose langchain if you want the larger community (148,892 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose openscience if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.