OpenPanel significantly outpaces Trench in community adoption with 6,251 stars compared to 1,648 stars on GitHub. This 3.8x difference suggests OpenPanel has a much larger and more active community. In terms of developer contributions, OpenPanel has 401 forks, indicating moderate developer engagement.

OpenPanel shows more recent development activity with its last commit 24 days ago, while Trench was last updated 4 months ago. This suggests OpenPanel is being more actively maintained.

Both tools share common technology foundations, being built with JavaScript, CSS, Bash, Typescript. However, they differ in their additional technology choices: OpenPanel uses JSX, Next.js while Trench leverages NestJS.

Both projects started around the same time, with OpenPanel beginning 2 years ago and Trench 2 years ago.

Trench uses the MIT license, which is more permissive than OpenPanel's AGPL-3.0 license, potentially offering greater flexibility for commercial use and integration.

Both tools serve similar use cases in Product Analytics. However, they also have distinct specializations: OpenPanel also focuses on Web Analytics while Trench extends into Event Streaming Platforms, Stream Processing.

Both OpenPanel and Trench offer self-hosting capabilities, giving you full control over your data and infrastructure.