head to head · open source
Tabby vs calico
Tabby has 33,884 GitHub stars, 1,789 forks, 335 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. calico has 7,358 stars, 1,606 forks, 279 open issues and last shipped today. Tabby leads on adoption by 361% (33,884 vs 7,358 stars). Tabby is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; calico is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Tabby has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, calico 22%. calico 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
| Tabby | calico | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 34K | ★ 7.4K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Rust | Go |
| Last push | 2026-06-30 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.8K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Tabby if
- You weight community size — 34K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick calico if
- You want the calico feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and calico fits your workflow better
About Tabby
Tabby is a self hosted, open source AI coding assistant that acts as an on premises alternative to GitHub Copilot, aimed at developers and engineering teams that want code completion and chat without routing source code through a third party cloud service.
read the full Tabby overview →
About calico
Calico is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed cloud native networking and network security project for Kubernetes clusters, maintained by Tigera and aimed at platform engineers, cluster operators and network teams who need container networking, network policy enforcement and encryption across on premises, cloud and bare metal environments.
read the full calico overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Tabby or calico more popular?
Tabby has 33,884 GitHub stars and calico has 7,358. Tabby has the larger community by that measure.
Are Tabby and calico free?
Both are open source. Tabby has no licence declared in this registry, and calico is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Tabby and calico?
Tabby is written in Rust and calico in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Tabby or calico?
Choose Tabby if you want the larger community (33,884 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose calico if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.