head to head · open source
OpenTofu vs crossplane
OpenTofu has 30,204 GitHub stars, 1,367 forks, 320 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crossplane has 12,083 stars, 1,264 forks, 194 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. OpenTofu leads on adoption by 150% (30,204 vs 12,083 stars). OpenTofu is written in Go under MPL-2.0; crossplane is written in Go under Apache-2.0. OpenTofu has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, crossplane 10%. 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 | crossplane | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 12K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 1.3K |
| 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 crossplane if
- You want the crossplane 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 crossplane 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 crossplane
Crossplane is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation framework for building cloud native control planes without writing code, aimed at platform and infrastructure teams that run Kubernetes and need to orchestrate applications and infrastructure across clouds through declarative APIs.
read the full crossplane overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenTofu or crossplane more popular?
OpenTofu has 30,204 GitHub stars and crossplane has 12,083. OpenTofu has the larger community by that measure.
Are OpenTofu and crossplane free?
Both are open source. OpenTofu is licensed under MPL-2.0 and crossplane under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between OpenTofu and crossplane?
OpenTofu is written in Go and crossplane 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 crossplane?
Choose OpenTofu if you want the larger community (30,204 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose crossplane if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.