head to head · open source
LobeChat vs Risuai
LobeChat has 82,576 GitHub stars, 15,895 forks, 922 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Risuai has 1,688 stars, 349 forks, 160 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. LobeChat leads on adoption by 4,792% (82,576 vs 1,688 stars). LobeChat is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; Risuai is written in TypeScript under GPL-3.0. LobeChat has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, Risuai 21%. LobeChat was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (ai, claude, 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 | Risuai | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 83K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | Custom / other | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 16K | ⑂ 349 |
| 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 Risuai if
- You want the Risuai 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 Risuai 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 Risuai
Risuai is a cross platform, open source AI chat and roleplay client, written in TypeScript with Svelte and Tauri and licensed under GPL 3.0, for people who want to run character driven conversations against the language model of their choice instead of a single vendor's locked down chat window.
read the full Risuai overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is LobeChat or Risuai more popular?
LobeChat has 82,576 GitHub stars and Risuai has 1,688. LobeChat has the larger community by that measure.
Are LobeChat and Risuai free?
Both are open source. LobeChat has no licence declared in this registry, and Risuai is licensed under GPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between LobeChat and Risuai?
LobeChat is written in TypeScript and Risuai 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 Risuai?
Choose LobeChat if you want the larger community (82,576 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose Risuai if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.