31 open-source agent projects clear the popularity bar, led by OpenClaw at 411K stars

Asked:

List ALL popular open-source agents and agentic frameworks

“Popular” is defined operationally: at least 5,000 reported GitHub stars or mentions on at least 3 distinct relevant web pages, verified as a runnable AI agent or an agent framework/platform. As of 2026-08-31 the search yielded a 150-row longlist and 31 high-confidence leaders — 15 agent applications and 16 frameworks/platforms — together holding about 3.9M reported stars.

Agent application — a runnable agentFramework / platform — build agents with itBar length = maximum reported GitHub stars; hover for mentions and detail

Mentions and stars disagree: CrewAI has the most cross-source mentions of all 31 leaders (453) yet ranks 23rd by stars at 75K — medium.com

Coding agents are the densest cluster: OpenCode, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenHands and Cline all sit in the leader set — pinggy.io

Star counts are source-reported maxima, not one synchronized snapshot: the same repository shows 187K in one list and 82K in another for AutoGPT — aiagent.club

Some web lists count source-available or fair-code projects as open source; the leader set includes rows with a blank license — verify the repository LICENSE before adoption — eesel.ai

Directory: 144 popularity-qualified repositories

The expanded 150-row catalog, with duplicate and alias repository entries merged into 144 canonical rows. Blank cells mean the retrieved pages did not state a value.

Project	Repository	Stars	Mentions	Category	License	Description	Source

Method: diversified live web searches across rankings, comparisons, project lists and GitHub pages, research date 2026-08-31. 150 catalog rows normalized to 144 canonical repositories; 31 high-confidence leaders cross-verified against 3+ sources. Stars are the maximum reported by any retrieved source, not a GitHub API snapshot; mention counts are distinct-page tallies and were summed when duplicate repository rows merged. Categories and licenses are shown only where sources stated them; long descriptions were truncated for space. “Open source” in some source lists includes source-available and fair-code projects.