head to head · open source
LibreTranslate vs papermill
LibreTranslate has 16,674 GitHub stars, 1,707 forks, 126 open issues and last shipped 17 days ago. papermill has 6,485 stars, 462 forks, 196 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. LibreTranslate leads on adoption by 157% (16,674 vs 6,485 stars). LibreTranslate is written in Python under AGPL-3.0; papermill is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. LibreTranslate has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, papermill 7%. LibreTranslate 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
| LibreTranslate | papermill | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 6.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-03 | 2026-07-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 462 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick LibreTranslate if
- You weight community size — 17K 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 papermill if
- You want the papermill feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and papermill fits your workflow better
About LibreTranslate
LibreTranslate is a free and open source machine translation API written in Python and released under the AGPL 3.0 license. It lives in the open source translation ecosystem and is positioned as a self hosted alternative to hosted translation services. The project does not rely on proprietary software such as Google or Azure for translation. Instead, it uses the open source Argos Translate library as its translation engine.
read the full LibreTranslate overview →
About papermill
Papermill is a Python tool published under the BSD 3 Clause licence by the nteract project that parameterizes, executes, and analyzes Jupyter notebooks, and it is aimed at teams who need to run the same notebook repeatedly with different inputs inside data pipelines.
read the full papermill overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is LibreTranslate or papermill more popular?
LibreTranslate has 16,674 GitHub stars and papermill has 6,485. LibreTranslate has the larger community by that measure.
Are LibreTranslate and papermill free?
Both are open source. LibreTranslate is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and papermill under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between LibreTranslate and papermill?
LibreTranslate is written in Python and papermill 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, LibreTranslate or papermill?
Choose LibreTranslate if you want the larger community (16,674 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose papermill if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.