head to head · open source
LobeChat vs Cherry Studio
LobeChat has 82,547 GitHub stars, 15,891 forks, 922 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Cherry Studio has 51,923 stars, 4,976 forks, 1,514 open issues and last shipped yesterday. LobeChat leads on adoption by 59% (82,547 vs 51,923 stars). LobeChat is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; Cherry Studio is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. LobeChat has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, Cherry Studio 10%. Cherry Studio was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (deepseek), 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 | Cherry Studio | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 83K | ★ 52K |
| License | Custom / other | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 16K | ⑂ 5.0K |
| 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 Cherry Studio if
- You want the Cherry Studio feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Cherry Studio 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 Cherry Studio
Cherry Studio is a cross platform desktop application for interacting with large language models, built in TypeScript under the AGPL 3.0 license. It operates in the AI interaction and interfaces ecosystem, providing a unified interface to access cloud hosted models (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic), web services (Claude, Poe, Perplexity), and locally hosted models via Ollama or LM Studio.
read the full Cherry Studio overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is LobeChat or Cherry Studio more popular?
LobeChat has 82,547 GitHub stars and Cherry Studio has 51,923. LobeChat has the larger community by that measure.
Are LobeChat and Cherry Studio free?
Both are open source. LobeChat has no licence declared in this registry, and Cherry Studio is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between LobeChat and Cherry Studio?
LobeChat is written in TypeScript and Cherry Studio 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 Cherry Studio?
Choose LobeChat if you want the larger community (82,547 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Cherry Studio if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.