holaOS Hit 11k Stars in Under Six Months: the Open-Source Workspace That Runs Claude Code and Codex Side by Side

holaOS has been hard to miss in developer feeds lately. We queried the GitHub API directly on 2026-09-07 rather than trusting a secondhand leaderboard:

11.1k stars in under six months is fast even by 2026 standards. Stars alone say little, though — the question is what it solves.

1. The pitch: parts, not a finished product

The README is direct about positioning: most agent products hand you a finished product and hope it fits your work; holaOS hands you the parts. Apps, chat tools, skills, integrations, models, agents and memory — you assemble the workspace around how your work runs, and rearrange it when the work changes.

Concretely, the README highlights:

• HolaApps: install apps from an in-workspace marketplace and they open as real interactive surfaces — Notion, a browser, your own app — beside the agent. What you click, type or open by hand becomes context the agent already has, so you never stop to re-explain.
• The chat tools your team already uses: Slack, Feishu, DingTalk, WeChat. The stated reason is blunt — most work context never makes it into a document; it lives in a thread.
• Integrations and MCP: one-click OAuth for Gmail, Notion, Slack, GitHub, Linear and 50+ more, plus any MCP server.
• Models: Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2 built in for everyday volume, GPT 5.6, Claude Opus 5 and Fable 5 for hard problems, or BYOK so inference runs on your own account.
• Agents are swappable: Claude Code, Codex and the built-in agent run side by side, sharing the same memory, tools, skills and apps.

2. The real draw is one memory across agents

This is the part worth attention. Most people today run one setup for Claude Code, another for Codex, another elsewhere — re-explaining the project each time they switch.

holaOS pulls memory out of the agent: context, preferences and project history are stored locally as plain files you can read and edit. The README’s phrasing is “memory is a folder you can read, not a black box”.

The privacy design follows the same line: workspace files, memory, embeddings and session history all live on your own disk, with the README stating there is no copy of your work on their servers, and every action — connecting a tool, reading a thread, editing a file — requires your approval.

3. Two things to check before adopting

1. The licence field reads NOASSERTION.

That is GitHub’s way of saying its licence detection could not classify the repository as a standard open-source licence. The README’s OSS release notes explain why:

License: modified Apache 2.0 with additional commercial-distribution and branding conditions.

So it is Apache 2.0 with modifications — extra conditions on commercial distribution and branding — which is exactly why automatic detection declines to label it.

Practically: self-hosting for yourself is unlikely to be an issue, but read the LICENSE file line by line before bundling it into a commercial product, redistributing it, or using the branding. Seeing “Apache 2.0” in the notes is not the same as standard Apache 2.0.

2. Last push was 2026-08-21.

Roughly two weeks of quiet as of the verification date. Not alarming for a fast-moving project, but if this is going into a production workflow, check the release cadence and issue responsiveness first. Six open issues is, in fairness, a healthy number.

4. Who should look

• Anyone running two or more agents and re-explaining context on every switch — shared memory is the immediate payoff.
• Teams whose data cannot leave their machines — local-first is the default here, not an option.
• People who want to assemble their own workflow rather than be shaped by one product.

If you use a single agent and have no cross-tool context problem, the flexibility is overhead you will not use.

To run it on your own machine, see holaOS local install and first setup.

Figures obtained by calling the GitHub REST API directly on 2026-09-07; feature descriptions from the holaOS README and the project site. Stars and push dates move — check the live repository. Verify the licence terms yourself. Related agent pricing is summarised on our Claude tool page.