head to head · open source
Trigger vs swarmclaw
Trigger has 16,345 GitHub stars, 1,464 forks, 342 open issues and last shipped today. swarmclaw has 677 stars, 139 forks, 20 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Trigger leads on adoption by 2,314% (16,345 vs 677 stars). Trigger is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; swarmclaw is written in TypeScript under MIT. Trigger has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, swarmclaw 21%. Trigger was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (ai, ai-agent-framework, 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 | swarmclaw | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 677 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-06-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 139 |
| 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 swarmclaw if
- You want the swarmclaw feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and swarmclaw 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 swarmclaw
SwarmClaw is an open source, self hosted AI agent runtime and multi agent framework for autonomous agent swarms, written in TypeScript under the MIT licence for developers and operators who want to run AI agents and agent orchestration on their own infrastructure.
read the full swarmclaw overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Trigger or swarmclaw more popular?
Trigger has 16,345 GitHub stars and swarmclaw has 677. Trigger has the larger community by that measure.
Are Trigger and swarmclaw free?
Both are open source. Trigger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and swarmclaw under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Trigger and swarmclaw?
Trigger is written in TypeScript and swarmclaw 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 swarmclaw?
Choose Trigger if you want the larger community (16,345 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose swarmclaw if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.