head to head · open source
OpenTofu vs goss
OpenTofu has 30,204 GitHub stars, 1,367 forks, 320 open issues and last shipped yesterday. goss has 5,971 stars, 501 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. OpenTofu leads on adoption by 406% (30,204 vs 5,971 stars). OpenTofu is written in Go under MPL-2.0; goss is written in Go under Apache-2.0. OpenTofu has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, goss 8%. 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 | goss | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 501 |
| 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 goss if
- You want the goss 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 goss 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 goss
Goss is an Apache 2.0 licensed, Go based YAML test runner that validates the configuration of a server or container and can expose the result as a health endpoint, built for DevOps engineers and SREs who need fast, repeatable checks on Linux hosts, Docker containers, and Kubernetes workloads.
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenTofu or goss more popular?
OpenTofu has 30,204 GitHub stars and goss has 5,971. OpenTofu has the larger community by that measure.
Are OpenTofu and goss free?
Both are open source. OpenTofu is licensed under MPL-2.0 and goss under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between OpenTofu and goss?
OpenTofu is written in Go and goss 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 goss?
Choose OpenTofu if you want the larger community (30,204 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose goss if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.