head to head · open source
odysseus vs botman
odysseus has 87,371 GitHub stars, 907 forks, 1,233 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. botman has 6,160 stars, 812 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. odysseus leads on adoption by 1,318% (87,371 vs 6,160 stars). odysseus is written in Python under AGPL-3.0; botman is written in PHP under MIT. odysseus has attracted 1% as many forks as stars, botman 13%. odysseus 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 | botman | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 6.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-04-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 907 | ⑂ 812 |
| 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 botman if
- You want the botman feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and botman 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 botman
BotMan is a framework agnostic PHP library for building chat bots that run across multiple messaging platforms from a single codebase, aimed at PHP developers and Laravel teams who want cross platform bot logic without writing separate integration code for every service.
read the full botman overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is odysseus or botman more popular?
odysseus has 87,371 GitHub stars and botman has 6,160. odysseus has the larger community by that measure.
Are odysseus and botman free?
Both are open source. odysseus is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and botman under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between odysseus and botman?
odysseus is written in Python and botman in PHP. 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 botman?
Choose odysseus if you want the larger community (87,371 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose botman if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.