head to head · open source
Trigger vs happier
Trigger has 16,376 GitHub stars, 1,467 forks, 342 open issues and last shipped yesterday. happier has 1,706 stars, 152 forks, 160 open issues and last shipped today. Trigger leads on adoption by 860% (16,376 vs 1,706 stars). Trigger is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; happier is written in TypeScript under MIT. Trigger has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, happier 9%. happier 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 | happier | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-22 | 2026-09-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 152 |
| 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 happier if
- You want the happier feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and happier 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 happier
Happier is an open source, MIT licensed control room for coding agents: it runs Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi and others in parallel on your own machines, and lets you approve, steer, review and commit from web, desktop and mobile clients that are fully end to end encrypted.
read the full happier overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Trigger or happier more popular?
Trigger has 16,376 GitHub stars and happier has 1,706. Trigger has the larger community by that measure.
Are Trigger and happier free?
Both are open source. Trigger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and happier under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Trigger and happier?
Trigger is written in TypeScript and happier 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 happier?
Choose Trigger if you want the larger community (16,376 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose happier if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.