head to head · open source
Cherry Studio vs QwenPaw
Cherry Studio has 52,003 GitHub stars, 4,978 forks, 1,514 open issues and last shipped today. QwenPaw has 35,130 stars, 3,119 forks, 990 open issues and last shipped today. Cherry Studio leads on adoption by 48% (52,003 vs 35,130 stars). Cherry Studio is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; QwenPaw is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Cherry Studio has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, QwenPaw 9%. Cherry Studio was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-agent), 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
| Cherry Studio | QwenPaw | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 35K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 3.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Cherry Studio if
- You weight community size — 52K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick QwenPaw if
- You want the QwenPaw feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and QwenPaw fits your workflow better
About Cherry Studio
Cherry Studio is a cross platform desktop application for interacting with large language models, built in TypeScript under the AGPL 3.0 license. It operates in the AI interaction and interfaces ecosystem, providing a unified interface to access cloud hosted models (OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic), web services (Claude, Poe, Perplexity), and locally hosted models via Ollama or LM Studio.
read the full Cherry Studio overview →
About QwenPaw
QwenPaw is a personal AI assistant harness under the Apache 2.0 licence, aimed at people who want an LLM agent running on their own machine or in their own cloud account and reachable from the chat apps they already use.
read the full QwenPaw overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cherry Studio or QwenPaw more popular?
Cherry Studio has 52,003 GitHub stars and QwenPaw has 35,130. Cherry Studio has the larger community by that measure.
Are Cherry Studio and QwenPaw free?
Both are open source. Cherry Studio is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and QwenPaw under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Cherry Studio and QwenPaw?
Cherry Studio is written in TypeScript and QwenPaw in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Cherry Studio or QwenPaw?
Choose Cherry Studio if you want the larger community (52,003 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose QwenPaw if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.