head to head · open source
OpenHands vs SWE-agent
OpenHands has 88,312 GitHub stars, 11,598 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. SWE-agent has 20,344 stars, 2,224 forks, 102 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. OpenHands leads on adoption by 334% (88,312 vs 20,344 stars). OpenHands is written in TypeScript under MIT; SWE-agent is written in Python under MIT. OpenHands has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, SWE-agent 11%. OpenHands was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (agent, developer-tools, llm), 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
| OpenHands | SWE-agent | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 88K | ★ 20K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 2.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick OpenHands if
- You weight community size — 88K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick SWE-agent if
- You want the SWE-agent feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and SWE-agent fits your workflow better
About OpenHands
OpenHands is an open source platform that provides a self hosted control center—Agent Canvas—for managing and orchestrating autonomous AI coding agents. It lives in the developer tools and AI assisted coding ecosystem, designed to turn local or remote agents into a persistent, automated engineering team. The platform supports multiple agent backends and integrates with third party services to enable scheduled or event driven automation workflows.
read the full OpenHands overview →
About SWE-agent
SWE agent is a Python, MIT licensed open source project in the AI assisted coding and agent ecosystem. It is an agent based model for developer tools that takes a GitHub issue and tries to automatically fix it using a chosen language model. The project is associated with NeurIPS 2024 and is maintained by researchers from Princeton University and Stanford University.
read the full SWE-agent overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenHands or SWE-agent more popular?
OpenHands has 88,312 GitHub stars and SWE-agent has 20,344. OpenHands has the larger community by that measure.
Are OpenHands and SWE-agent free?
Both are open source. OpenHands is licensed under MIT and SWE-agent under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between OpenHands and SWE-agent?
OpenHands is written in TypeScript and SWE-agent 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, OpenHands or SWE-agent?
Choose OpenHands if you want the larger community (88,312 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose SWE-agent if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.