head to head · open source
rancher vs cloudstack
rancher has 26,035 GitHub stars, 3,227 forks, 3,371 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cloudstack has 3,126 stars, 1,418 forks, 1,048 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. rancher leads on adoption by 733% (26,035 vs 3,126 stars). rancher is written in Go under Apache-2.0; cloudstack is written in Java under Apache-2.0. rancher has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, cloudstack 45%. rancher was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (kubernetes, orchestration), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| rancher | cloudstack | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 3.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.2K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick rancher if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cloudstack if
- You want the cloudstack feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and cloudstack fits your workflow better
About rancher
Rancher Rancher is an open source container management platform built for organizations that deploy containers in production. Rancher makes it easy to run Kubernetes everywhere, meet IT requirements, and empower DevOps teams. Stable Release v2.15.1 rancher/rancher:v2.15.1 / rancher/rancher:stable Read the full release notes. To get automated notifications of our latest release, you can watch the announcements category in our forums, or subscribe to the RSS feed Quick Start sudo docker run d restart=unless stopped p 80:80 p 443:443 privileged rancher/rancher Open your browser to Installation See…
read the full rancher overview →
About cloudstack
Apache CloudStack Who Uses CloudStack? Demo Getting Started Getting Source Repository Documentation News and Events Getting Involved and Contributing Reporting Security Vulnerabilities License Notice of Cryptographic Software Star History Contributors Apache CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. CloudStack is used by a number of service providers to offer public cloud services, and by many companies to provide an on premises (private) cloud offering…
read the full cloudstack overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is rancher or cloudstack more popular?
rancher has 26,035 GitHub stars and cloudstack has 3,126. rancher has the larger community by that measure.
Are rancher and cloudstack free?
Both are open source. rancher is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cloudstack under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between rancher and cloudstack?
rancher is written in Go and cloudstack in Java. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, rancher or cloudstack?
Choose rancher if you want the larger community (26,035 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cloudstack if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.