head to head · open source
ponytail vs xberg
ponytail has 141,465 GitHub stars, 7,581 forks, 270 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. xberg has 9,321 stars, 585 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ponytail leads on adoption by 1,418% (141,465 vs 9,321 stars). ponytail is written in JavaScript under MIT; xberg is written in Rust under MIT. ponytail has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, xberg 6%. xberg 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
| ponytail | xberg | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 141K | ★ 9.3K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.6K | ⑂ 585 |
| 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 xberg if
- You want the xberg feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and xberg 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 xberg
Xberg is a Rust core document intelligence engine that extracts text, metadata, images, tables, and structured data from documents, images, audio, archives, URLs, and source trees, and it is built for developers and data teams who want one extraction core instead of a pipeline stitched together from many libraries.
read the full xberg overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is ponytail or xberg more popular?
ponytail has 141,465 GitHub stars and xberg has 9,321. ponytail has the larger community by that measure.
Are ponytail and xberg free?
Both are open source. ponytail is licensed under MIT and xberg under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ponytail and xberg?
ponytail is written in JavaScript and xberg 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, ponytail or xberg?
Choose ponytail if you want the larger community (141,465 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose xberg if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.