head to head · open source
LobeChat vs ai
LobeChat has 82,576 GitHub stars, 15,895 forks, 922 open issues and last shipped today. ai has 3,122 stars, 331 forks, 89 open issues and last shipped today. LobeChat leads on adoption by 2,545% (82,576 vs 3,122 stars). LobeChat is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; ai is written in TypeScript under MIT. LobeChat has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, ai 11%. ai was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ai, gemini), 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
| LobeChat | ai | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 83K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 16K | ⑂ 331 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick LobeChat if
- You weight community size — 83K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick ai if
- You want the ai feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and ai fits your workflow better
About LobeChat
LobeHub is an open source platform for managing, building, and operating AI agent teams. It functions as a Chief Agent Operator (CAO), enabling users to organize, schedule, and monitor autonomous AI agents around the clock. The project lives in the AI interaction and interfaces ecosystem, integrating with major LLM providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and Alibaba’s GLM series.
read the full LobeChat overview →
About ai
TanStack AI is a type safe, provider agnostic TypeScript SDK for building streaming chat, tool calling agents, structured outputs, realtime voice, and multimodal applications across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini, with framework native clients for React, Solid, Vue, Svelte, and Preact.
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Frequently asked questions
Is LobeChat or ai more popular?
LobeChat has 82,576 GitHub stars and ai has 3,122. LobeChat has the larger community by that measure.
Are LobeChat and ai free?
Both are open source. LobeChat has no licence declared in this registry, and ai is licensed under MIT. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between LobeChat and ai?
LobeChat is written in TypeScript and ai 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, LobeChat or ai?
Choose LobeChat if you want the larger community (82,576 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose ai if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.