head to head · open source
lynis vs rundeck
lynis has 16,611 GitHub stars, 1,645 forks, 224 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. rundeck has 6,353 stars, 989 forks, 81 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lynis leads on adoption by 161% (16,611 vs 6,353 stars). lynis is written in Shell under GPL-3.0; rundeck is written in Groovy under Apache-2.0. lynis has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, rundeck 16%. rundeck was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (devops, devops-tools), 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
| lynis | rundeck | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 17K | ★ 6.4K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Shell | Groovy |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 989 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick lynis if
- You weight community size — 17K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Shell
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick rundeck if
- You want the rundeck feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Groovy
- You evaluated both and rundeck fits your workflow better
About lynis
[Documentation] [Documentation]: Do you like this software? Star the project and become a stargazer. lynis Lynis Security auditing and hardening tool, for UNIX based systems. Lynis is a security auditing tool for systems based on UNIX like Linux, macOS, BSD, and others. It performs an in depth security scan and runs on the system itself. The primary goal is to test security defenses and provide tips for further system hardening . It will also scan for general system information, vulnerable software packages, and possible configuration issues. Lynis was commonly used by system administrators and auditors to…
read the full lynis overview →
About rundeck
Execute workflows across your existing automations or quickly automate previously manual procedures. Rundeck by PagerDuty is an open source runbook automation service with a web console, command line tools and a WebAPI. It lets you easily standardize tasks to improve operational quality by deploying automation across a set of nodes. Visit the Website Read the latest documentation Get help from the Community Install Rundeck See the Release Notes for the latest version information. How To Build: Primary build is supported with gradle. More info in the wiki. Requirements: Java 11, NodeJs 18 Cloudsmith…
read the full rundeck overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lynis or rundeck more popular?
lynis has 16,611 GitHub stars and rundeck has 6,353. lynis has the larger community by that measure.
Are lynis and rundeck free?
Both are open source. lynis is licensed under GPL-3.0 and rundeck under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lynis and rundeck?
lynis is written in Shell and rundeck in Groovy. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, lynis or rundeck?
Choose lynis if you want the larger community (16,611 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose rundeck if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.