head to head · open source
Trigger vs agent-swarm
Trigger has 16,345 GitHub stars, 1,464 forks, 342 open issues and last shipped today. agent-swarm has 810 stars, 105 forks, 11 open issues and last shipped today. Trigger leads on adoption by 1,918% (16,345 vs 810 stars). Trigger is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; agent-swarm is written in TypeScript under MIT. Trigger has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, agent-swarm 13%. Trigger was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-agents), 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
| Trigger | agent-swarm | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 810 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 105 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Trigger if
- You weight community size — 16K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick agent-swarm if
- You want the agent-swarm feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and agent-swarm fits your workflow better
About Trigger
Trigger is an open source TypeScript platform for building and deploying AI agents and workflow tasks. It lives in the infrastructure, orchestration, and scheduling ecosystem, and it is positioned as a way to run long running AI tasks without typical serverless timeout constraints. The project provides a software development kit, a deployment target, and operational features such as retries, queues, observability, and elastic scaling.
read the full Trigger overview →
About agent-swarm
Agent Swarm is an MIT licensed, self hosted orchestration engine that runs a lead agent delegating goals to worker agents inside isolated Docker containers, built for teams that want their company to become AI native while keeping the work on their own infrastructure.
read the full agent-swarm overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Trigger or agent-swarm more popular?
Trigger has 16,345 GitHub stars and agent-swarm has 810. Trigger has the larger community by that measure.
Are Trigger and agent-swarm free?
Both are open source. Trigger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and agent-swarm under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Trigger and agent-swarm?
Trigger is written in TypeScript and agent-swarm 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, Trigger or agent-swarm?
Choose Trigger if you want the larger community (16,345 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose agent-swarm if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.