head to head · open source
shannon vs pentest-ai-agents
shannon has 48,105 GitHub stars, 5,515 forks, 18 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. pentest-ai-agents has 2,239 stars, 428 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. shannon leads on adoption by 2,049% (48,105 vs 2,239 stars). shannon is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; pentest-ai-agents is written in Shell under MIT. shannon has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, pentest-ai-agents 19%. shannon was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (ai-security, cybersecurity, ethical-hacking, offensive-security), 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
| shannon | pentest-ai-agents | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 2.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Shell |
| Last push | 2026-09-08 | 2026-08-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.5K | ⑂ 428 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick shannon if
- You weight community size — 48K 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 pentest-ai-agents if
- You want the pentest-ai-agents feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Shell
- You evaluated both and pentest-ai-agents fits your workflow better
About shannon
Shannon is an autonomous AI pentester for web applications and APIs that reads an application's source code, identifies attack paths, and executes real exploits so that only vulnerabilities with a working proof of concept are reported, built for AppSec, DevSecOps, and security engineering teams that ship code continuously.
read the full shannon overview →
About pentest-ai-agents
pentest ai agents: 50 Claude Code subagents for authorized offensive security research. Lives in Claude Code ecosystem. Agents carry domain knowledge for recon, web, Active Directory, cloud, mobile, wireless, social engineering, payload crafting, reverse engineering, exploit chaining, detection engineering, forensics.
read the full pentest-ai-agents overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is shannon or pentest-ai-agents more popular?
shannon has 48,105 GitHub stars and pentest-ai-agents has 2,239. shannon has the larger community by that measure.
Are shannon and pentest-ai-agents free?
Both are open source. shannon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and pentest-ai-agents under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between shannon and pentest-ai-agents?
shannon is written in TypeScript and pentest-ai-agents in Shell. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, shannon or pentest-ai-agents?
Choose shannon if you want the larger community (48,105 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose pentest-ai-agents if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.