head to head · open source
jenkins vs cds
jenkins has 26,719 GitHub stars, 9,819 forks, 3,610 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cds has 4,847 stars, 457 forks, 160 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jenkins leads on adoption by 451% (26,719 vs 4,847 stars). jenkins is written in Java under MIT; cds is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. jenkins has attracted 37% as many forks as stars, cds 9%. jenkins was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (continuous-delivery, continuous-deployment, continuous-integration, 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
| jenkins | cds | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 27K | ★ 4.8K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.8K | ⑂ 457 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick jenkins if
- You weight community size — 27K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cds if
- You want the cds feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cds fits your workflow better
About jenkins
Table of Contents About What to Use Jenkins for and When to Use It Downloads Getting Started (Development) Source Contributing to Jenkins News and Website Governance Adopters License About In a nutshell, Jenkins is the leading open source automation server. Built with Java, it provides over 2,000 plugins to support automating virtually anything, so that humans can spend their time doing things machines cannot. What to Use Jenkins for and When to Use It Use Jenkins to automate your development workflow, so you can focus on work that matters most. Jenkins is commonly used for: Building projects Running tests to…
read the full jenkins overview →
About cds
CDS: Continuous Delivery Service CDS is an Enterprise Grade Continuous Delivery & DevOps Automation Platform written in Go(lang). This project is under active development Documentation Intuitive UI CDS provides an intuitive UI that allows you to build complex workflows, run them and dig into the logs when needed. Create and run workflow with CDS ui. The most powerful Command Line for a CI/CD Platform cdsctl is the CDS Command Line you can script everything with it, cdsctl also provides some cool commands such as cdsctl shell to browse your projects and workflows without the need to open a browser. See all cdsctl…
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Frequently asked questions
Is jenkins or cds more popular?
jenkins has 26,719 GitHub stars and cds has 4,847. jenkins has the larger community by that measure.
Are jenkins and cds free?
Both are open source. jenkins is licensed under MIT and cds under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jenkins and cds?
jenkins is written in Java and cds 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, jenkins or cds?
Choose jenkins if you want the larger community (26,719 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cds if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.