head to head · open source
OpenTofu vs cds
OpenTofu has 30,209 GitHub stars, 1,368 forks, 320 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cds has 4,843 stars, 453 forks, 160 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenTofu leads on adoption by 524% (30,209 vs 4,843 stars). OpenTofu is written in Go under MPL-2.0; cds is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. OpenTofu has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, cds 9%. OpenTofu was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| OpenTofu | cds | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 4.8K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 453 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick OpenTofu if
- You weight community size — 30K stars and counting
- You want the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cds if
- You want the cds feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cds fits your workflow better
About OpenTofu
OpenTofu is an open source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that enables users to define and manage cloud and on premises infrastructure using declarative configuration files. It lives in the cloud infrastructure management ecosystem and serves as a community driven fork of Terraform, maintaining compatibility with Terraform’s configuration language and provider ecosystem while operating under the MPL 2.0 license.
read the full OpenTofu overview →
About cds
CDS is an open source, enterprise grade continuous delivery and DevOps automation platform written in Go, for teams that build, run and own their own CI/CD workflows and want to script and scale them without depending on a hosted vendor.
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenTofu or cds more popular?
OpenTofu has 30,209 GitHub stars and cds has 4,843. OpenTofu has the larger community by that measure.
Are OpenTofu and cds free?
Both are open source. OpenTofu is licensed under MPL-2.0 and cds under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between OpenTofu and cds?
OpenTofu is written in Go and cds 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, OpenTofu or cds?
Choose OpenTofu if you want the larger community (30,209 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose cds if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.