head to head · open source
Ollama vs odysseus
Ollama has 181,290 GitHub stars, 17,939 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped yesterday. odysseus has 87,407 stars, 921 forks, 1,233 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Ollama leads on adoption by 107% (181,290 vs 87,407 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; odysseus is written in Python under AGPL-3.0. Ollama has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, odysseus 1%. Ollama 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
| Ollama | odysseus | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 181K | ★ 87K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 921 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ollama if
- You weight community size — 181K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick odysseus if
- You want the odysseus feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and odysseus fits your workflow better
About Ollama
Ollama is a Go based, MIT licensed runtime that downloads and runs open source large language models such as DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, GLM, MiniMax and gpt oss locally on a user's own machine, and it is aimed at developers and teams that want model inference without routing prompts through a hosted API.
read the full Ollama overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ollama or odysseus more popular?
Ollama has 181,290 GitHub stars and odysseus has 87,407. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and odysseus free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and odysseus under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and odysseus?
Ollama is written in Go and odysseus 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, Ollama or odysseus?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (181,290 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose odysseus if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.