head to head · open source
chatbox vs wechaty
chatbox has 41,791 GitHub stars, 4,252 forks, 1,290 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. wechaty has 23,269 stars, 2,879 forks, 198 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. chatbox leads on adoption by 80% (41,791 vs 23,269 stars). chatbox is written in TypeScript under GPL-3.0; wechaty is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. chatbox has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, wechaty 12%. chatbox was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (chatbot), 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
| chatbox | wechaty | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 42K | ★ 23K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2025-12-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.3K | ⑂ 2.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick chatbox if
- You weight community size — 42K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick wechaty if
- You want the wechaty feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and wechaty fits your workflow better
About chatbox
Chatbox (Community Edition) is a cross platform desktop client for large language models, written in TypeScript and released under the GPL 3.0 license. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and it connects to a range of providers including OpenAI (ChatGPT), Azure OpenAI, Claude, Google Gemini Pro, Ollama and ChatGLM 6B. The project lives in the AI interaction and interfaces ecosystem, where desktop chat front ends sit between a user and one or more hosted or locally hosted model APIs. The repository carries 41,767 stars and 4,251 forks across four years of history.
read the full chatbox overview →
About wechaty
Wechaty is an open source conversational RPA (Robotic Process Automation) SDK for chatbot makers, written in TypeScript and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Node.js and npm ecosystem, and it presents itself as a universal interface to messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and WeChat, with support for additional platforms. The project has been developed for roughly ten years, carries more than 23,000 stars and 2,800 forks on GitHub, and its documentation and community hub live at wechaty.js.org.
read the full wechaty overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is chatbox or wechaty more popular?
chatbox has 41,791 GitHub stars and wechaty has 23,269. chatbox has the larger community by that measure.
Are chatbox and wechaty free?
Both are open source. chatbox is licensed under GPL-3.0 and wechaty under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between chatbox and wechaty?
chatbox is written in TypeScript and wechaty 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, chatbox or wechaty?
Choose chatbox if you want the larger community (41,791 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose wechaty if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.