head to head · open source
superplane vs shepherd
superplane has 7,510 GitHub stars, 639 forks, 617 open issues and last shipped yesterday. shepherd has 2,432 stars, 211 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. superplane leads on adoption by 209% (7,510 vs 2,432 stars). superplane is written in Go under Apache-2.0; shepherd is written in Python under MIT. superplane has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, shepherd 9%. superplane was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (workflow-automation), 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
| superplane | shepherd | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 7.5K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 639 | ⑂ 211 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick superplane if
- You weight community size — 7.5K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick shepherd if
- You want the shepherd feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and shepherd fits your workflow better
About superplane
SuperPlane is an open source control plane for automating routine software engineering work, distributed under the Apache License 2.0 and written primarily in Go. It describes itself as an "open source factory for one shot engineering," and it lives in the DevOps, platform engineering and workflow automation ecosystem. The project is currently in beta, with its source, releases and issue tracker hosted on GitHub.
read the full superplane overview →
About shepherd
Shepherd is a Python runtime substrate that records an agent's execution as a reversible, Git like trace so that meta agents can observe, fork, replay, and revert any run — built for engineers and researchers who supervise, optimise, or train other agents.
read the full shepherd overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is superplane or shepherd more popular?
superplane has 7,510 GitHub stars and shepherd has 2,432. superplane has the larger community by that measure.
Are superplane and shepherd free?
Both are open source. superplane is licensed under Apache-2.0 and shepherd under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between superplane and shepherd?
superplane is written in Go and shepherd in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, superplane or shepherd?
Choose superplane if you want the larger community (7,510 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose shepherd if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.