head to head · open source
herdr vs plandex
herdr has 41,950 GitHub stars, 3,252 forks, 337 open issues and last shipped yesterday. plandex has 15,687 stars, 1,178 forks, 66 open issues and last shipped 1.0 years ago. herdr leads on adoption by 167% (41,950 vs 15,687 stars). herdr is written in Rust under Apache-2.0; plandex is written in Go under MIT. herdr has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, plandex 8%. herdr was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (ai, ai-agents, cli, 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
| herdr | plandex | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 42K | ★ 16K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-02 | 2025-10-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick herdr if
- You weight community size — 42K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick plandex if
- You want the plandex feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and plandex fits your workflow better
About herdr
herdr is a terminal first runtime for coding agents — a single Rust binary that owns the terminals in which tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode and Grok run, aimed at developers who keep agents working across local and remote machines and want those sessions to survive a lost SSH connection or a closed client.
read the full herdr overview →
About plandex
Plandex is an open source, terminal based AI coding agent for developers who need to plan and execute large coding tasks spanning dozens of files in real world projects.
read the full plandex overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is herdr or plandex more popular?
herdr has 41,950 GitHub stars and plandex has 15,687. herdr has the larger community by that measure.
Are herdr and plandex free?
Both are open source. herdr is licensed under Apache-2.0 and plandex under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between herdr and plandex?
herdr is written in Rust and plandex in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, herdr or plandex?
Choose herdr if you want the larger community (41,950 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose plandex if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.