head to head · open source
OpenTofu vs goss
OpenTofu has 30,703 GitHub stars, 1,414 forks, 320 open issues and last shipped yesterday. goss has 6,000 stars, 502 forks, 57 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. OpenTofu leads on adoption by 412% (30,703 vs 6,000 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 | ★ 31K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 502 |
| 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 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
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 goss
Goss Quick and Easy server validation Goss in 45 seconds Note: For testing containers see the dgoss wrapper. Also, user submitted wrapper scripts for Kubernetes kgoss and Docker Compose dcgoss. Note: For some Docker/Kubernetes healthcheck, health endpoint, and container ordering examples, see [my blog post][kubernetes simplified health checks]. Introduction What is Goss? Goss is a YAML based serverspec alternative tool for validating a server's configuration. It eases the process of writing tests by allowing the user to generate tests from the current system state. Once the test suite is written they can be…
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenTofu or goss more popular?
OpenTofu has 30,703 GitHub stars and goss has 6,000. 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 (30,703 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.