head to head · open source
compose vs moon
compose has 38,175 GitHub stars, 5,817 forks, 111 open issues and last shipped yesterday. moon has 4,105 stars, 252 forks, 99 open issues and last shipped yesterday. compose leads on adoption by 830% (38,175 vs 4,105 stars). compose is written in Go under Apache-2.0; moon is written in Rust under MIT. compose has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, moon 6%. moon was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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
| compose | moon | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 38K | ★ 4.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.8K | ⑂ 252 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick compose if
- You weight community size — 38K 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 moon if
- You want the moon feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and moon fits your workflow better
About compose
Docker Compose is an Apache 2.0 licensed Go tool that defines and runs multi container applications on Docker from a single Compose file, aimed at developers and operators who need several containers to start together as one isolated application.
read the full compose overview →
About moon
moon is a repository management, organization, orchestration, and notification tool for the web ecosystem, written in Rust under the MIT license. It is a build system and monorepo management tool whose concepts are heavily inspired by Bazel and other build systems. The project is associated with build system, monorepo tooling, ci cd, Node.js, JavaScript, Bun, Deno, Go, Python, and Ruby topics.
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Frequently asked questions
Is compose or moon more popular?
compose has 38,175 GitHub stars and moon has 4,105. compose has the larger community by that measure.
Are compose and moon free?
Both are open source. compose is licensed under Apache-2.0 and moon under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between compose and moon?
compose is written in Go and moon in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, compose or moon?
Choose compose if you want the larger community (38,175 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose moon if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.