head to head · open source
jenkins vs dagger
jenkins has 26,719 GitHub stars, 9,819 forks, 3,610 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dagger has 16,573 stars, 946 forks, 156 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jenkins leads on adoption by 61% (26,719 vs 16,573 stars). jenkins is written in Java under MIT; dagger is written in Go under Apache-2.0. jenkins has attracted 37% 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 3 topic tags (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 | dagger | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 27K | ★ 17K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.8K | ⑂ 946 |
| 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 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 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 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 jenkins or dagger more popular?
jenkins has 26,719 GitHub stars and dagger has 16,573. jenkins has the larger community by that measure.
Are jenkins and dagger free?
Both are open source. jenkins is licensed under MIT and dagger under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jenkins and dagger?
jenkins is written in Java 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, jenkins or dagger?
Choose jenkins if you want the larger community (26,719 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose dagger if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.