head to head · open source
vllm vs Beam
vllm has 96,158 GitHub stars, 24,317 forks, 7,953 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Beam has 1,842 stars, 175 forks, 21 open issues and last shipped yesterday. vllm leads on adoption by 5,120% (96,158 vs 1,842 stars). vllm is written in Python under Apache-2.0; Beam is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. vllm has attracted 25% as many forks as stars, Beam 10%. vllm was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (cuda, llm), 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
| vllm | Beam | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 96K | ★ 1.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 24K | ⑂ 175 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick vllm if
- You weight community size — 96K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Beam if
- You want the Beam feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Beam fits your workflow better
About vllm
Easy, fast, and cheap LLM serving for everyone 🔥 We have built a vLLM website to help you get started with vLLM. Please visit vllm.ai to learn more. For events, please visit vllm.ai/events to join us. About vLLM is a fast and easy to use library for LLM inference and serving. Originally developed in the Sky Computing Lab at UC Berkeley, vLLM has grown into one of the most active open source AI projects built and maintained by a diverse community of many dozens of academic institutions and companies from over 2000 contributors. vLLM is fast with: State of the art serving throughput Efficient management of…
About Beam
Run AI Workloads at Scale Beam is a fast, open source runtime for serverless AI workloads. It gives you a Pythonic interface to deploy and scale AI applications with zero infrastructure overhead. ✨ Features Fast Cold Starts : Launch containers in under a second using a custom container runtime, scheduler, and embedded caching Parallelization and Concurrency : Fan out workloads to 100s of containers First Class Developer Experience : Hot reloading, webhooks, and scheduled jobs Scale to Zero : Workloads are serverless by default Volume Storage : Mount distributed storage volumes GPU Support : Run on our cloud…
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Frequently asked questions
Is vllm or Beam more popular?
vllm has 96,158 GitHub stars and Beam has 1,842. vllm has the larger community by that measure.
Are vllm and Beam free?
Both are open source. vllm is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Beam under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between vllm and Beam?
vllm is written in Python and Beam 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, vllm or Beam?
Choose vllm if you want the larger community (96,158 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Beam if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.