head to head · open source
OpenTofu vs cds
OpenTofu has 30,703 GitHub stars, 1,414 forks, 320 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cds has 4,847 stars, 457 forks, 160 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenTofu leads on adoption by 533% (30,703 vs 4,847 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 | ★ 31K | ★ 4.8K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 457 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick OpenTofu if
- You weight community size — 31K 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
Homepage Slack Get Started OpenTofu is an OSS tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. OpenTofu can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in house solutions. Getting help and contributing Have a question? Post it in GitHub Discussions Open a GitHub issue Join us in the opentofu channel on the CNCF Slack! Want to contribute? Please read the Contribution Guide. Recurring Events Community Meetings on Wednesdays at 12:30 UTC (calendar) Technical Steering Committee Meetings every other Tuesday at 4pm UTC (calendar) [!TIP] For more OpenTofu events…
read the full OpenTofu overview →
About cds
CDS: Continuous Delivery Service CDS is an Enterprise Grade Continuous Delivery & DevOps Automation Platform written in Go(lang). This project is under active development Documentation Intuitive UI CDS provides an intuitive UI that allows you to build complex workflows, run them and dig into the logs when needed. Create and run workflow with CDS ui. The most powerful Command Line for a CI/CD Platform cdsctl is the CDS Command Line you can script everything with it, cdsctl also provides some cool commands such as cdsctl shell to browse your projects and workflows without the need to open a browser. See all cdsctl…
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenTofu or cds more popular?
OpenTofu has 30,703 GitHub stars and cds has 4,847. 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 (30,703 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.