head to head · open source
sops vs dagger
sops has 23,586 GitHub stars, 1,113 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dagger has 16,573 stars, 946 forks, 156 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sops leads on adoption by 42% (23,586 vs 16,573 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.
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Side by side
| sops | dagger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 24K | ★ 17K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.1K | ⑂ 946 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick sops if
- You weight community size — 24K 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: Secrets OPerationS ======================== SOPS is an editor of encrypted files that supports YAML, JSON, ENV, INI and BINARY formats and encrypts with AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, HuaweiCloud KMS, age, and PGP. ( demo ) .. image:: .. image:: :target: Documentation You can find the SOPS documentation on getsops.io under "Docs" . Security Please report any security issues privately using GitHub's advisory form . License Mozilla Public License Version 2.0 Authors SOPS was initially launched as a project at Mozilla in 2015 and has been graciously donated to the CNCF as a Sandbox project in 2023, now…
About dagger
Dagger: a better way to ship Dagger is a platform for automating software delivery. It can build, test and ship any codebase, reliably and at scale. Dagger runs locally, in your CI server, or directly in the cloud. Why Dagger? Dagger makes your software delivery programmable , local first , repeatable and observable . Programmable . Shell scripts and proprietary YAML are no longer acceptable for automating software delivery. Dagger provides: a complete execution engine and system API; SDKs for 8 languages; an interactive REPL; a rich ecosystem of reusable modules; and more. Local first . Once you automate a task…
read the full dagger overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is sops or dagger more popular?
sops has 23,586 GitHub stars and dagger has 16,573. 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 (23,586 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.