head to head · open source
sops vs dagger
sops has 23,147 GitHub stars, 1,081 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. dagger has 16,261 stars, 924 forks, 156 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sops leads on adoption by 42% (23,147 vs 16,261 stars). sops is written in Go under MPL-2.0; dagger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. sops has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, dagger 6%. 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| sops | dagger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 16K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 924 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick sops if
- You weight community size — 23K stars and counting
- You want the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick dagger if
- You want the dagger 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 dagger fits your workflow better
About sops
SOPS, short for Secrets OPerationS, is an editor of encrypted files written in Go and released under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0. It handles YAML, JSON, ENV, INI and BINARY formats, and it encrypts those files using AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, HuaweiCloud KMS, age, or PGP. The project lives in the cloud native infrastructure ecosystem: it started at Mozilla in 2015, was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2023, and is now a CNCF Sandbox project under a new group of maintainers. It carries 23,121 stars and 1,080 forks, with documentation hosted at getsops.io.
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 →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Cloud Infrastructure Management projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Cloud Infrastructure Management field.
Frequently asked questions
Is sops or dagger more popular?
sops has 23,147 GitHub stars and dagger has 16,261. sops has the larger community by that measure.
Are sops and dagger free?
Both are open source. sops is licensed under MPL-2.0 and dagger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between sops and dagger?
sops is written in Go and dagger 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, sops or dagger?
Choose sops if you want the larger community (23,147 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose dagger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.