head to head · open source
Polar vs budget-board
Polar has 10,270 GitHub stars, 787 forks, 141 open issues and last shipped yesterday. budget-board has 884 stars, 63 forks, 11 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Polar leads on adoption by 1,062% (10,270 vs 884 stars). Polar is written in Python under Apache-2.0; budget-board is written in C# under AGPL-3.0. Polar has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, budget-board 7%. Polar 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
| Polar | budget-board | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 10K | ★ 884 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | C# |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 787 | ⑂ 63 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Polar if
- You weight community size — 10K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick budget-board if
- You want the budget-board feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and budget-board fits your workflow better
About Polar
Polar is an open source billing platform and payment infrastructure project for digital products, SaaS applications, and AI workloads. It is written in Python, licensed under Apache 2.0, and built around FastAPI, Next.js, React, and Turborepo. The project positions itself as a financial layer for software that needs to charge for tokens, agents, compute, subscriptions, and usage based models.
read the full Polar overview →
About budget-board
Budget Board is a self hosted personal finance application for tracking monthly spending and working towards financial goals. It is written in C and built on ASP.NET with a ReactJS front end, and it lives in the .NET ecosystem as a container friendly web application released under the AGPL 3.0 license. The project has been on GitHub for six years, holds 884 stars and 63 forks, and its public documentation and wiki are hosted at budgetboard.net.
read the full budget-board overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Polar or budget-board more popular?
Polar has 10,270 GitHub stars and budget-board has 884. Polar has the larger community by that measure.
Are Polar and budget-board free?
Both are open source. Polar is licensed under Apache-2.0 and budget-board under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Polar and budget-board?
Polar is written in Python and budget-board in C#. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Polar or budget-board?
Choose Polar if you want the larger community (10,270 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose budget-board if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.