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Cheshire Cat AI vs Letta

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted self-hosted ai options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
CH Cheshire Cat AI Framework for building AI assistants with memory and plugins VS LE Letta Build stateful LLM agents with long-term memory
FeatureCheshire Cat AILetta
Deploy effortUnder-an-hour setupUnder-an-hour setup
Health score85 · Excellent96 · Excellent
CategorySelf-Hosted AISelf-Hosted AI
LicenseGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
LanguagePythonPython
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM2,048 MB2,048 MB
Deploymentdockerdocker, source
GitHub stars★ 3,090★ 24,864
First released20232023
ReplacesOpenAI AssistantsOpenAI Assistants

What are Cheshire Cat AI and Letta?

Cheshire Cat AI

Cheshire Cat AI is a framework for developing custom AI agents on top of any language model. It provides conversational memory, a plugin system, and a ready-to-use admin panel for building production assistants.

  • Long-term memory
  • Plugin marketplace
  • Model-agnostic
  • Admin dashboard

Letta

Letta, formerly known as MemGPT, is an open-source framework for building LLM agents with persistent memory and advanced reasoning. It provides a server, agent development kit, and visual interface for creating stateful assistants.

  • Persistent agent memory
  • Self-editing context
  • Agent Development Kit
  • Visual agent editor

Read the full Letta guide →

Cheshire Cat AI vs Letta: key differences

Both projects are written in Python. Licensing differs — GPL-3.0 for Cheshire Cat AI versus Apache-2.0 for Letta. Letta has the considerably larger community, at 24,864 GitHub stars versus 3,090.

Why pick each one

Choose Cheshire Cat AI if…

  • Released under the GPL-3.0 license
  • First-class Docker support for quick deployment
  • Active community (3.1k GitHub stars)
  • Written in Python

Watch out for

  • Plugin docs still maturing
  • Requires LLM backend
Cheshire Cat AI details

Choose Letta if…

  • Persistent agent memory
  • Visual agent builder
  • Model-agnostic design

Watch out for

  • Concept-heavy
  • Best with capable models
Letta details

Frequently asked questions

Is Cheshire Cat AI or Letta better?

Neither is universally better. Letta has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Cheshire Cat AI and Letta free and open-source?

Yes. Cheshire Cat AI is licensed under GPL-3.0 and Letta under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Cheshire Cat AI and Letta with Docker?

Cheshire Cat AI: yes. Letta: yes.

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