head to head · open source
ponytail vs ragflow
ponytail has 141,230 GitHub stars, 7,572 forks, 270 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. ragflow has 90,889 stars, 10,759 forks, 1,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ponytail leads on adoption by 55% (141,230 vs 90,889 stars). ponytail is written in JavaScript under MIT; ragflow is written in Go under Apache-2.0. ponytail has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, ragflow 12%. ragflow was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-agents), 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
| ponytail | ragflow | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 141K | ★ 91K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.6K | ⑂ 11K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick ponytail if
- You weight community size — 141K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick ragflow if
- You want the ragflow feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and ragflow fits your workflow better
About ponytail
Ponytail is an open source agent skill for JavaScript and LLM based coding tools that makes an AI agent write the minimum working code for a task, and it is built for developers and teams running agents such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor against real repositories.
read the full ponytail overview →
About ragflow
RAGFlow is an open source Retrieval Augmented Generation engine that fuses RAG with agent capabilities into a context layer for large language models, built for developers and teams that need to turn complex, unstructured documents into production AI systems.
read the full ragflow overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is ponytail or ragflow more popular?
ponytail has 141,230 GitHub stars and ragflow has 90,889. ponytail has the larger community by that measure.
Are ponytail and ragflow free?
Both are open source. ponytail is licensed under MIT and ragflow under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ponytail and ragflow?
ponytail is written in JavaScript and ragflow 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, ponytail or ragflow?
Choose ponytail if you want the larger community (141,230 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ragflow if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.