head to head · open source
lynis vs rundeck
lynis has 16,355 GitHub stars, 1,635 forks, 224 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. rundeck has 6,301 stars, 987 forks, 81 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lynis leads on adoption by 160% (16,355 vs 6,301 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 | ★ 16K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Shell | Groovy |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 987 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick lynis if
- You weight community size — 16K 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
Lynis is an agentless, GPL 3.0 security auditing and hardening tool that runs on the UNIX based system itself, built for system administrators, auditors, security officers, and penetration testers who need to assess security defenses and test compliance against standards such as ISO27001, PCI DSS, and HIPAA.
read the full lynis overview →
About rundeck
Rundeck is an open source runbook automation service maintained by PagerDuty, distributed under the Apache License 2.0 and published from the rundeck.org homepage. It provides a web console, command line tools, and a WebAPI, and its stated purpose is to enable self service operations by giving specific users access to existing tools, services, and scripts. The repository is 16 years old and lives in the DevOps and operations tooling ecosystem, alongside topics such as ansible, automation, deployment, audit, ops, and devops tools.
read the full rundeck overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lynis or rundeck more popular?
lynis has 16,355 GitHub stars and rundeck has 6,301. 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 (16,355 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.