head to head · open source
odysseus vs kotaemon
odysseus has 87,371 GitHub stars, 907 forks, 1,233 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. kotaemon has 25,774 stars, 2,155 forks, 247 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. odysseus leads on adoption by 239% (87,371 vs 25,774 stars). odysseus is written in Python under AGPL-3.0; kotaemon is written in Python under Apache-2.0. odysseus has attracted 1% as many forks as stars, kotaemon 8%. 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 | kotaemon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 26K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-07-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 907 | ⑂ 2.2K |
| 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 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 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 kotaemon
kotaemon is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed Python project that provides a clean and customizable retrieval augmented generation (RAG) UI for chatting with documents. It sits in the AI and machine learning ecosystem, specifically under AI interaction and interfaces, and is built on Gradio so that the interface itself can be extended or modified. The README frames the project as serving two distinct audiences at once: end users who want to do question answering over their own files, and developers who want to build their own RAG pipeline on top of the framework.
read the full kotaemon overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is odysseus or kotaemon more popular?
odysseus has 87,371 GitHub stars and kotaemon has 25,774. odysseus has the larger community by that measure.
Are odysseus and kotaemon free?
Both are open source. odysseus is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and kotaemon under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between odysseus and kotaemon?
odysseus 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, odysseus or kotaemon?
Choose odysseus if you want the larger community (87,371 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose kotaemon if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.