head to head · open source
OpenHands vs SWE-agent
OpenHands has 92,511 GitHub stars, 12,330 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. SWE-agent has 20,712 stars, 2,264 forks, 102 open issues and last shipped 8 days ago. OpenHands leads on adoption by 347% (92,511 vs 20,712 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 | ★ 93K | ★ 21K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick OpenHands if
- You weight community size — 93K 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
Agent Canvas The self hosted developer control center for coding agents and automations. Run OpenHands, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or any ACP compatible agent across local, remote, and cloud backends. Quickstart Docs Self Hosting ACP Agents Automations Slack OpenHands Agent Canvas turns your coding agents into a self hosted, always on engineering team. It's a developer control center for starting conversations and automating everyday tasks — like generating reports that publish to Slack or automatically decomposing GitHub issues into tasks. It runs locally on your machine by default, but can connect to multiple…
read the full OpenHands overview →
About SWE-agent
[!warning] Most of our current development effort is on mini swe agent, which has superseded SWE agent. It matches the performance performance of SWE agent, while being much simpler. See the FAQ for more details about the differences. Our general recommendation is to use mini SWE agent instead of SWE agent going forward. SWE agent enables your language model of choice (e.g. GPT 4o or Claude Sonnet 4) to autonomously use tools to fix issues in real GitHub repositories, find cybersecurity vulnerabilities, or perform any custom task. ✅ State of the art on SWE bench among open source projects ✅ Free flowing &…
read the full SWE-agent overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenHands or SWE-agent more popular?
OpenHands has 92,511 GitHub stars and SWE-agent has 20,712. 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 (92,511 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose SWE-agent if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.