head to head · open source
jenkins vs sops
jenkins has 26,556 GitHub stars, 9,835 forks, 3,610 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sops has 23,147 stars, 1,081 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. jenkins leads on adoption by 15% (26,556 vs 23,147 stars). jenkins is written in Java under MIT; sops is written in Go under MPL-2.0. jenkins has attracted 37% as many forks as stars, sops 5%. jenkins 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
| jenkins | sops | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 27K | ★ 23K |
| License | MIT | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.8K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 sops if
- You want the sops 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 sops fits your workflow better
About jenkins
Jenkins is an open source automation server built with Java and released under the MIT license. It lives in the continuous integration and continuous delivery ecosystem, where it has served as a central automation hub for roughly sixteen years. The project is developed in the open on GitHub, where it has accumulated 26,546 stars and 9,833 forks, and it is distributed through the official jenkins.io website alongside documentation, plugin listings, and release notes. Two release lines are maintained: a weekly line that carries all new features, improvements, and bug fixes, and a Long Term Support line that receive…
read the full jenkins overview →
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.
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 jenkins or sops more popular?
jenkins has 26,556 GitHub stars and sops has 23,147. jenkins has the larger community by that measure.
Are jenkins and sops free?
Both are open source. jenkins is licensed under MIT and sops under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jenkins and sops?
jenkins is written in Java and sops 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 sops?
Choose jenkins if you want the larger community (26,556 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose sops if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.