head to head · open source
lerna vs papermill
lerna has 36,053 GitHub stars, 2,265 forks, 287 open issues and last shipped yesterday. papermill has 6,486 stars, 463 forks, 196 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. lerna leads on adoption by 456% (36,053 vs 6,486 stars). lerna is written in TypeScript under MIT; papermill is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. lerna has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, papermill 7%. lerna was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (publishing), 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
| lerna | papermill | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 36K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-07-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 463 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick lerna if
- You weight community size — 36K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick papermill if
- You want the papermill feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and papermill fits your workflow better
About lerna
Lerna is a fast, modern build system for managing and publishing multiple JavaScript/TypeScript packages from the same repository, aimed at teams that maintain monorepos and publish packages to npm.
read the full lerna overview →
About papermill
Papermill is a Python tool published under the BSD 3 Clause licence by the nteract project that parameterizes, executes, and analyzes Jupyter notebooks, and it is aimed at teams who need to run the same notebook repeatedly with different inputs inside data pipelines.
read the full papermill overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lerna or papermill more popular?
lerna has 36,053 GitHub stars and papermill has 6,486. lerna has the larger community by that measure.
Are lerna and papermill free?
Both are open source. lerna is licensed under MIT and papermill under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lerna and papermill?
lerna is written in TypeScript and papermill in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, lerna or papermill?
Choose lerna if you want the larger community (36,053 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose papermill if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.