head to head · open source
Coder vs Encore
Coder has 17,263 GitHub stars, 1,644 forks, 996 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Encore has 12,688 stars, 653 forks, 127 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Coder leads on adoption by 36% (17,263 vs 12,688 stars). Coder is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; Encore is written in Go under MPL-2.0. Coder has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, Encore 5%. Coder was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (go, golang), 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
| Coder | Encore | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 13K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 653 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Coder if
- You weight community size — 17K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Encore if
- You want the Encore feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Encore fits your workflow better
About Coder
Self Hosted Cloud Development Environments and AI Agents Quickstart Docs Why Coder Premium Coder is a self hosted platform for cloud development environments and AI coding agents. Workspaces are defined with Terraform, connected through a secure Wireguard® tunnel, and automatically shut down when not used. Coder Agents runs a native AI coding agent whose loop executes in the control plane on your infrastructure, with no API keys in workspaces. Define cloud development environments in Terraform EC2 VMs, Kubernetes Pods, Docker Containers, etc. Automatically shutdown idle resources to save on costs Onboard…
read the full Coder overview →
About Encore
Encore: Infrastructure orchestration from local to your cloud What is Encore? Encore is the infrastructure platform for the intelligence era, where engineers and AI agents build production systems without waiting on infrastructure. Run and validate with real infrastructure locally and in preview environments, then deploy to your own AWS or GCP account. It has two parts that work together: An open source infrastructure SDK for TypeScript and Go. Declare the resources your app needs (databases, Pub/Sub, object storage, caches, cron jobs, secrets) directly in your code, and encore run starts the whole system…
read the full Encore overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Coder or Encore more popular?
Coder has 17,263 GitHub stars and Encore has 12,688. Coder has the larger community by that measure.
Are Coder and Encore free?
Both are open source. Coder is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Encore under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Coder and Encore?
Coder is written in Go and Encore in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Coder or Encore?
Choose Coder if you want the larger community (17,263 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Encore if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.