head to head · open source
Coder vs Encore
Coder has 15,676 GitHub stars, 1,525 forks, 996 open issues and last shipped today. Encore has 12,369 stars, 622 forks, 127 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Coder leads on adoption by 27% (15,676 vs 12,369 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 | ★ 16K | ★ 12K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 622 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Coder if
- You weight community size — 16K 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
Coder is a self hosted platform for cloud development environments and AI coding agents. It is written in Go, released under AGPL 3.0, and listed under Developer Tools / Version Control & Collaboration. Teams define workspaces with Terraform, connect through a secure Wireguard tunnel, and run environments on EC2 VMs, Kubernetes Pods, or Docker Containers.
read the full Coder overview →
About Encore
Encore is an open source infrastructure platform for backend development, written in Go under MPL 2.0. It lives in the Go and TypeScript cloud native ecosystem and lets developers declare databases, Pub/Sub, object storage, caches, cron jobs, and secrets in application code. The project combines an infrastructure SDK with an optional managed platform that deploys to a user's AWS or GCP account.
read the full Encore overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Coder or Encore more popular?
Coder has 15,676 GitHub stars and Encore has 12,369. 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 (15,676 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.