head to head · open source
jenkins vs terratest
jenkins has 26,719 GitHub stars, 9,819 forks, 3,610 open issues and last shipped yesterday. terratest has 7,989 stars, 1,366 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. jenkins leads on adoption by 234% (26,719 vs 7,989 stars). jenkins is written in Java under MIT; terratest is written in Go under Apache-2.0. jenkins has attracted 37% as many forks as stars, terratest 17%. 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 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| jenkins | terratest | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 27K | ★ 8.0K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Java | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.8K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| 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 terratest if
- You want the terratest 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 terratest 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 terratest
Terratest Terratest is a Go library that makes it easier to write automated tests for your infrastructure code. It provides a variety of helper functions and patterns for common infrastructure testing tasks, including: Testing Terraform code Testing Packer templates Testing Docker images Executing commands on servers over SSH Working with AWS APIs Working with Azure APIs Working with GCP APIs Working with Kubernetes APIs Testing Helm Charts Making HTTP requests Running shell commands And much more Install Requires Go 1.26 or later. To lock to a specific release instead of @latest , see Pinning a Terratest…
read the full terratest overview →
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 terratest more popular?
jenkins has 26,719 GitHub stars and terratest has 7,989. jenkins has the larger community by that measure.
Are jenkins and terratest free?
Both are open source. jenkins is licensed under MIT and terratest under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between jenkins and terratest?
jenkins is written in Java and terratest 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 terratest?
Choose jenkins if you want the larger community (26,719 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose terratest if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.