head to head · open source
dagger vs infracost
dagger has 16,261 GitHub stars, 924 forks, 156 open issues and last shipped yesterday. infracost has 12,521 stars, 688 forks, 22 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. dagger leads on adoption by 30% (16,261 vs 12,521 stars). dagger is written in Go under Apache-2.0; infracost is written in Go under Apache-2.0. dagger has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, infracost 5%. dagger was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (devops), 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
| dagger | infracost | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 924 | ⑂ 688 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick dagger if
- You weight community size — 16K 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 infracost if
- You want the infracost feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and infracost fits your workflow better
About dagger
Dagger is an open source automation engine for software delivery, written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It builds, tests and ships any codebase, and it runs locally, inside a CI server, or directly in the cloud. The project lives in the cloud infrastructure and CI/CD ecosystem, where it occupies the space normally filled by shell scripts and proprietary pipeline YAML. It has been developed for roughly seven years and carries a substantial community footprint, with more than sixteen thousand stars and over nine hundred forks on GitHub.
read the full dagger overview →
About infracost
Infracost is an open source cloud cost intelligence tool, written in Go and licensed Apache 2.0, that estimates cloud spend and enforces FinOps policies for Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation and AWS CDK before changes are deployed — built for engineers, platform and DevOps teams, FinOps practitioners, and AI coding agents.
read the full infracost overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is dagger or infracost more popular?
dagger has 16,261 GitHub stars and infracost has 12,521. dagger has the larger community by that measure.
Are dagger and infracost free?
Both are open source. dagger is licensed under Apache-2.0 and infracost under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between dagger and infracost?
dagger is written in Go and infracost 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, dagger or infracost?
Choose dagger if you want the larger community (16,261 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose infracost if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.