Yao: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What Yao does

Yao belongs to the multi-agent family: systems that split a task between several specialised agents passing work to one another. On our grid it ranks #31 of the 43 projects of this family listed in the directory.

You use it from: desktop app, mobile app, web app, and API. Usable models: Claude (Anthropic) and DeepSeek. It can run on your own machine or server.

Who is Yao for?

It interests technical teams that want to split a complex task between several specialised agents that check each other. Typical tasks people give it:

• pair a writer agent with a reviewer agent
• split a project into subtasks given to roles
• simulate a team (analysis, plan, execution)

It is a good candidate if you prefer doing everything in a browser, with no install and your data must stay on your machines.

Access and human control

Its documentation does not detail the access granted to the agent: check the settings before connecting it to your accounts.

We could not establish whether it asks for human approval before sensitive actions: test it first on an unimportant account or folder.

Yao pricing

The code is public but the repository declares no licence: reuse is not formally allowed. The real cost comes from model calls: each loop step sends the whole context back to the model, and a task of several dozen steps can cost far more than a single question. The LLM price calculator estimates it for the chosen model.

Getting started with Yao

1. Install it: the project ships as a single Go binary, downloadable from the repository releases. The exact command is in the repository README.
2. Create an API key with the model provider and put it in an environment variable, never in a shared or versioned file.
3. Give it a first playground with nothing at stake: a test folder, a secondary account or a throwaway project. Only open your real accounts once you have seen how it behaves.
4. Give it a short, checkable task, review the result and its action log, then raise the difficulty step by step.

Security: risk level

More agents mean higher bills and chained errors: set a budget and a maximum number of steps.

Points found for Yao:

• No licence: legally shaky for company use.

Three habits: least privilege (minimal rights, dedicated keys), human approval for irreversible actions, a sandbox for code execution. The AI agent security check reviews your setup in a few minutes.

Project activity and releases

Created on September 6, 2021, the YaoApp/yao repository has 8,185 stars, 727 forks and 5 open issues, with 4,332 commits in total. It received changes this month.

Over the last 52 weeks: 1,057 commits, an average of 20.3 per week.

74 releases in total; 29 in the last twelve months. Latest release: v1.0.0, on October 13, 2026.

Yao vs other multi-agent

GitHub stars of the best-rated open-source projects in the multi-agent family. Stars measure attention, not quality: a heavily promoted project collects them fast, a specialised tool will have few.

Yao and other multi-agent at a glance

The 7 best-ranked agents in the same family, 7 of them open source. The score out of 100 only applies to open-source projects; for proprietary services we show the published entry price. A dash marks information the documentation does not state.

How we rated it

Score: 63/100, computed only from public, verifiable data, with no subjective testing or partnership:

• Adoption 23/40: 8,185 stars on a log scale (40 points from about 200,000).
• Activity 30/30: last commit less than a month ago, 29 releases in six months, 1,057 commits in a year.
• Framework 10/30: licence, default human approval, self-hosting, model choice and documentation site.

The score does not say whether the agent will succeed at your tasks: it measures how solid the project is. The full grid is on the method page.