head to head · open source
Windmill vs local-deep-research
Windmill has 17,982 GitHub stars, 1,097 forks, 852 open issues and last shipped today. local-deep-research has 9,109 stars, 824 forks, 889 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Windmill leads on adoption by 97% (17,982 vs 9,109 stars). Windmill is written in Rust under a custom or non-standard licence; local-deep-research is written in Python under MIT. Windmill has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, local-deep-research 9%. Windmill was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Windmill | local-deep-research | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 9.1K |
| License | Custom / other | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 824 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Windmill if
- You weight community size — 18K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick local-deep-research if
- You want the local-deep-research feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and local-deep-research fits your workflow better
About Windmill
Windmill is an open source developer platform for internal code, including APIs, background jobs, workflows, and UIs. It lives in the self hostable low code automation ecosystem and supports Python, TypeScript, Go, Bash, SQL, GraphQL, PowerShell, Rust, and more. The project is positioned as an open source alternative to Zapier and, in the README, to Retool, Pipedream, Superblocks, and a simplified Temporal.
read the full Windmill overview →
About local-deep-research
Local Deep Research is an MIT licensed, Python based AI research assistant that performs deep, agentic research with proper citations across any local or cloud LLM and more than ten search engines, built for researchers, developers, and privacy conscious self hosters who want both the workload and the data to stay on hardware they control.
read the full local-deep-research overview →
More in Productivity & Utilities
Related comparisons
More Automation projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Automation field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Windmill or local-deep-research more popular?
Windmill has 17,982 GitHub stars and local-deep-research has 9,109. Windmill has the larger community by that measure.
Are Windmill and local-deep-research free?
Both are open source. Windmill has no licence declared in this registry, and local-deep-research is licensed under MIT. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Windmill and local-deep-research?
Windmill is written in Rust and local-deep-research in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Windmill or local-deep-research?
Choose Windmill if you want the larger community (17,982 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose local-deep-research if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.