head to head · open source
LobeChat vs botman
LobeChat has 82,576 GitHub stars, 15,895 forks, 922 open issues and last shipped today. botman has 6,160 stars, 812 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. LobeChat leads on adoption by 1,241% (82,576 vs 6,160 stars). LobeChat is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; botman is written in PHP under MIT. LobeChat has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, botman 13%. LobeChat 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| LobeChat | botman | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 83K | ★ 6.2K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-04-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 16K | ⑂ 812 |
| 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 botman if
- You want the botman feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and botman 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 botman
BotMan is a framework agnostic PHP library for building chat bots that run across multiple messaging platforms from a single codebase, aimed at PHP developers and Laravel teams who want cross platform bot logic without writing separate integration code for every service.
read the full botman overview →
More in AI & Machine Learning
Related comparisons
More AI Interaction & Interfaces projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the AI Interaction & Interfaces field.
Frequently asked questions
Is LobeChat or botman more popular?
LobeChat has 82,576 GitHub stars and botman has 6,160. LobeChat has the larger community by that measure.
Are LobeChat and botman free?
Both are open source. LobeChat has no licence declared in this registry, and botman is licensed under MIT. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between LobeChat and botman?
LobeChat is written in TypeScript and botman 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, LobeChat or botman?
Choose LobeChat if you want the larger community (82,576 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose botman if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.