head to head · open source
OpenHands vs Tabby
OpenHands has 88,312 GitHub stars, 11,598 forks, 713 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Tabby has 33,884 stars, 1,788 forks, 335 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. OpenHands leads on adoption by 161% (88,312 vs 33,884 stars). OpenHands is written in TypeScript under MIT; Tabby is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence. OpenHands has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, Tabby 5%. OpenHands was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (developer-tools), 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 | Tabby | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 88K | ★ 34K |
| License | MIT | Custom / other |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-06-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 1.8K |
| 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 Tabby if
- You want the Tabby feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Tabby 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 Tabby
Tabby is a self hosted, open source AI coding assistant that acts as an on premises alternative to GitHub Copilot, aimed at developers and engineering teams that want code completion and chat without routing source code through a third party cloud service.
read the full Tabby overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenHands or Tabby more popular?
OpenHands has 88,312 GitHub stars and Tabby has 33,884. OpenHands has the larger community by that measure.
Are OpenHands and Tabby free?
Both are open source. OpenHands is licensed under MIT, and Tabby has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between OpenHands and Tabby?
OpenHands is written in TypeScript and Tabby in Rust. 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 Tabby?
Choose OpenHands if you want the larger community (88,312 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Tabby if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.