head to head · open source
Cherry Studio vs sim
Cherry Studio has 52,003 GitHub stars, 4,978 forks, 1,514 open issues and last shipped today. sim has 29,680 stars, 3,843 forks, 336 open issues and last shipped today. Cherry Studio leads on adoption by 75% (52,003 vs 29,680 stars). Cherry Studio is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; sim is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Cherry Studio has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, sim 13%. sim was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (deepseek), 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 | sim | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 52K | ★ 30K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 3.8K |
| 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 sim if
- You want the sim 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 sim 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 sim
Sim is an open source collaborative workspace for building, deploying, and monitoring AI agents and workflows. It lives in the TypeScript ecosystem and is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, with a repository that has accumulated roughly 29,600 stars and 3,800 forks over its two year history. The project positions itself as a single surface where chat, workflows, tables, files, and knowledge coexist, whether accessed through a browser or a desktop application for macOS.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Cherry Studio or sim more popular?
Cherry Studio has 52,003 GitHub stars and sim has 29,680. Cherry Studio has the larger community by that measure.
Are Cherry Studio and sim free?
Both are open source. Cherry Studio is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and sim under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Cherry Studio and sim?
Cherry Studio is written in TypeScript and sim 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 sim?
Choose Cherry Studio if you want the larger community (52,003 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose sim if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.