head to head · open source
LobeChat vs chatbox
LobeChat has 82,547 GitHub stars, 15,891 forks, 922 open issues and last shipped yesterday. chatbox has 41,791 stars, 4,252 forks, 1,290 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. LobeChat leads on adoption by 98% (82,547 vs 41,791 stars). LobeChat is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; chatbox is written in TypeScript under GPL-3.0. LobeChat has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, chatbox 10%. LobeChat was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (chatgpt, claude, deepseek, 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 | chatbox | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 83K | ★ 42K |
| License | Custom / other | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 16K | ⑂ 4.3K |
| 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 chatbox if
- You want the chatbox feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and chatbox 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 chatbox
Chatbox (Community Edition) is a cross platform desktop client for large language models, written in TypeScript and released under the GPL 3.0 license. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and it connects to a range of providers including OpenAI (ChatGPT), Azure OpenAI, Claude, Google Gemini Pro, Ollama and ChatGLM 6B. The project lives in the AI interaction and interfaces ecosystem, where desktop chat front ends sit between a user and one or more hosted or locally hosted model APIs. The repository carries 41,767 stars and 4,251 forks across four years of history.
read the full chatbox overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is LobeChat or chatbox more popular?
LobeChat has 82,547 GitHub stars and chatbox has 41,791. LobeChat has the larger community by that measure.
Are LobeChat and chatbox free?
Both are open source. LobeChat has no licence declared in this registry, and chatbox is licensed under GPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between LobeChat and chatbox?
LobeChat is written in TypeScript and chatbox 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 chatbox?
Choose LobeChat if you want the larger community (82,547 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose chatbox if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.