head to head · open source
nanobot vs kotaemon
nanobot has 49,766 GitHub stars, 8,713 forks, 775 open issues and last shipped yesterday. kotaemon has 25,849 stars, 2,164 forks, 247 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. nanobot leads on adoption by 93% (49,766 vs 25,849 stars). nanobot is written in Python under MIT; kotaemon is written in Python under Apache-2.0. nanobot has attracted 18% as many forks as stars, kotaemon 8%. nanobot was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (chatbot, llms), 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
| nanobot | kotaemon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 26K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-07-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick nanobot if
- You weight community size — 50K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick kotaemon if
- You want the kotaemon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and kotaemon fits your workflow better
About nanobot
English 简体中文 繁體中文 Español Français Bahasa Indonesia 日本語 한국어 Русский Tiếng Việt Discord · X · WeChat / Feishu nanobot 🐈 nanobot is an ultra lightweight, open source, self hosted personal AI agent framework written in Python. It runs in a WebUI, terminal, or chat apps and combines tools, long term memory, MCP integrations, model routing, multi agent delegation, scheduled automation, and an OpenAI compatible API in a small, readable core. Start Here What can nanobot do? nanobot is a self hosted personal AI agent runtime. It can: run in a browser WebUI or terminal connect to Telegram, Discord, Slack, WeChat, Email…
read the full nanobot overview →
About kotaemon
kotaemon An open source clean & customizable RAG UI for chatting with your documents. Built with both end users and developers in mind. Live Demo 1 Live Demo 2 Online Install Colab Notebook (Local RAG) User Guide Developer Guide Feedback Contact Introduction This project serves as a functional RAG UI for both end users who want to do QA on their documents and developers who want to build their own RAG pipeline. For end users Clean & Minimalistic UI : A user friendly interface for RAG based QA. Support for Various LLMs : Compatible with LLM API providers (OpenAI, AzureOpenAI, Cohere, etc.) and local LLMs (via…
read the full kotaemon overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nanobot or kotaemon more popular?
nanobot has 49,766 GitHub stars and kotaemon has 25,849. nanobot has the larger community by that measure.
Are nanobot and kotaemon free?
Both are open source. nanobot is licensed under MIT and kotaemon under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nanobot and kotaemon?
nanobot is written in Python and kotaemon in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, nanobot or kotaemon?
Choose nanobot if you want the larger community (49,766 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose kotaemon if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.