head to head · open source
jenkins vs sops
jenkins has 26,719 GitHub stars, 9,819 forks, 3,610 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sops has 23,586 stars, 1,113 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jenkins leads on adoption by 13% (26,719 vs 23,586 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.
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Side by side
| jenkins | sops | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 27K | ★ 24K |
| License | MIT | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| 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
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 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…
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Frequently asked questions
Is jenkins or sops more popular?
jenkins has 26,719 GitHub stars and sops has 23,586. 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 (26,719 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose sops if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.