head to head · open source
odysseus vs Athena-Public
odysseus has 87,371 GitHub stars, 907 forks, 1,233 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Athena-Public has 589 stars, 78 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped yesterday. odysseus leads on adoption by 14,734% (87,371 vs 589 stars). odysseus is written in Python under AGPL-3.0; Athena-Public is written in Python under MIT. odysseus has attracted 1% as many forks as stars, Athena-Public 13%. Athena-Public 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.
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Side by side
| odysseus | Athena-Public | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 589 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 907 | ⑂ 78 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick odysseus if
- You weight community size — 87K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Athena-Public if
- You want the Athena-Public feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and Athena-Public fits your workflow better
About odysseus
Odysseus is a self hosted AI workspace written in Python and released under the AGPL 3.0 or later licence, built for people who want chat, agents, research, documents, email, notes, tasks, and calendar in one deployment on infrastructure they control.
read the full odysseus overview →
About Athena-Public
Athena is a local first agentic personal knowledge management system that keeps your memory, reasoning context, and agent governance in plain Markdown files on your own machine and points any large language model at them, built for people who accumulate context across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini and do not want it trapped inside a single provider.
read the full Athena-Public overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is odysseus or Athena-Public more popular?
odysseus has 87,371 GitHub stars and Athena-Public has 589. odysseus has the larger community by that measure.
Are odysseus and Athena-Public free?
Both are open source. odysseus is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Athena-Public under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between odysseus and Athena-Public?
odysseus is written in Python and Athena-Public 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, odysseus or Athena-Public?
Choose odysseus if you want the larger community (87,371 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Athena-Public if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.