head to head · open source
Trigger vs cli-agent-orchestrator
Trigger has 16,345 GitHub stars, 1,464 forks, 342 open issues and last shipped today. cli-agent-orchestrator has 1,320 stars, 272 forks, 151 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Trigger leads on adoption by 1,138% (16,345 vs 1,320 stars). Trigger is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; cli-agent-orchestrator is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Trigger has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, cli-agent-orchestrator 21%. 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 | cli-agent-orchestrator | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 1.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 272 |
| 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 cli-agent-orchestrator if
- You want the cli-agent-orchestrator feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and cli-agent-orchestrator 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 cli-agent-orchestrator
CLI Agent Orchestrator (CAO) is an Apache 2.0 Python tool that runs a local cao server and coordinates multiple AI coding CLIs, such as Claude Code, Kiro, Codex and Cursor CLI, as supervisor and worker agents inside isolated tmux sessions, and it is aimed at developers and teams who already have at least one of those provider CLIs installed and authenticated and want them working together.
read the full cli-agent-orchestrator overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Trigger or cli-agent-orchestrator more popular?
Trigger has 16,345 GitHub stars and cli-agent-orchestrator has 1,320. Trigger has the larger community by that measure.
Are Trigger and cli-agent-orchestrator free?
Both are open source. Trigger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cli-agent-orchestrator under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Trigger and cli-agent-orchestrator?
Trigger is written in TypeScript and cli-agent-orchestrator 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, Trigger or cli-agent-orchestrator?
Choose Trigger if you want the larger community (16,345 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cli-agent-orchestrator if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.