head to head · open source
OpenTofu vs sops
OpenTofu has 30,204 GitHub stars, 1,367 forks, 320 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sops has 23,147 stars, 1,081 forks, 446 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. OpenTofu leads on adoption by 30% (30,204 vs 23,147 stars). OpenTofu is written in Go under MPL-2.0; sops is written in Go under MPL-2.0. OpenTofu has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, sops 5%. 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| OpenTofu | sops | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 30K | ★ 23K |
| License | MPL-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 sops if
- You want the sops feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and sops 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 sops
SOPS, short for Secrets OPerationS, is an editor of encrypted files written in Go and released under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0. It handles YAML, JSON, ENV, INI and BINARY formats, and it encrypts those files using AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault, HuaweiCloud KMS, age, or PGP. The project lives in the cloud native infrastructure ecosystem: it started at Mozilla in 2015, was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2023, and is now a CNCF Sandbox project under a new group of maintainers. It carries 23,121 stars and 1,080 forks, with documentation hosted at getsops.io.
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Cloud Infrastructure Management projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Cloud Infrastructure Management field.
Frequently asked questions
Is OpenTofu or sops more popular?
OpenTofu has 30,204 GitHub stars and sops has 23,147. OpenTofu has the larger community by that measure.
Are OpenTofu and sops free?
Both are open source. OpenTofu is licensed under MPL-2.0 and sops under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between OpenTofu and sops?
OpenTofu is written in Go and sops 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 sops?
Choose OpenTofu if you want the larger community (30,204 stars) or its MPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose sops if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.