head to head · open source

vllm vs Spanlens

vllm has 92,028 GitHub stars, 22,335 forks, 7,953 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Spanlens has 13 stars, 0 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. vllm leads on adoption by 707,808% (92,028 vs 13 stars). vllm is written in Python under Apache-2.0; Spanlens is written in TypeScript under MIT. vllm has attracted 24% as many forks as stars, Spanlens 0%. vllm was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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.

vllm ★ 92K Spanlens ★ 13 category AI & Machine Learning

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Side by side

	vllm	Spanlens
GitHub stars	★ 92K	★ 13
License	Apache-2.0	MIT
Written in	Python	TypeScript
Last push	2026-09-17	2026-09-14
Forks	⑂ 22K	⑂ 0
Self-hosting	Yes	Yes
Data ownership	Your server	Your server

pick vllm if

You weight community size — 92K 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

full vllm profile →

pick Spanlens if

You want the Spanlens feature set and don't need the biggest community
You prefer the MIT license terms
Your stack matches TypeScript
You evaluated both and Spanlens fits your workflow better

full Spanlens profile →

About vllm

vLLM is a high throughput, memory efficient Python library for LLM inference and serving, built for ML engineers and platform teams who need to run open weight models on their own hardware at production scale.

read the full vllm overview →

About Spanlens

Spanlens is an MIT licensed, open source LLM observability and monitoring layer that sits as a drop in proxy in front of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini clients to log every call's cost, tokens, latency, and agent traces, built for developers running LLM applications in production who need more than a provider dashboard's total spend.

read the full Spanlens overview →

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vllm vs Ollama vllm vs llama.cpp vllm vs GPT4All vllm vs llama_index vllm vs LocalAI vllm vs PageIndex vllm vs Langfuse vllm vs cognee vllm vs taipy vllm vs dagster vllm vs zvec vllm vs langchain4j

Frequently asked questions

Is vllm or Spanlens more popular?

vllm has 92,028 GitHub stars and Spanlens has 13. vllm has the larger community by that measure.

Are vllm and Spanlens free?

Both are open source. vllm is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Spanlens under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.

What is the difference between vllm and Spanlens?

vllm is written in Python and Spanlens 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, vllm or Spanlens?

Choose vllm if you want the larger community (92,028 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Spanlens if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.