head to head · open source
portainer vs cds
portainer has 38,524 GitHub stars, 2,906 forks, 757 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cds has 4,843 stars, 453 forks, 160 open issues and last shipped yesterday. portainer leads on adoption by 695% (38,524 vs 4,843 stars). portainer is written in TypeScript under Zlib; cds is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. portainer has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, cds 9%. cds was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (hacktoberfest), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| portainer | cds | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 4.8K |
| License | Zlib | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.9K | ⑂ 453 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick portainer if
- You weight community size — 39K stars and counting
- You want the Zlib license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- 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 portainer
Portainer Community Edition is a free, lightweight container management UI for Docker, Swarm, Podman, Kubernetes, and ACI environments, distributed under the zlib licence and aimed at homelab operators, hobbyists, students, and anyone experimenting with containers on their own hardware.
read the full portainer overview →
About cds
CDS is an open source, enterprise grade continuous delivery and DevOps automation platform written in Go, for teams that build, run and own their own CI/CD workflows and want to script and scale them without depending on a hosted vendor.
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Frequently asked questions
Is portainer or cds more popular?
portainer has 38,524 GitHub stars and cds has 4,843. portainer has the larger community by that measure.
Are portainer and cds free?
Both are open source. portainer is licensed under Zlib and cds under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between portainer and cds?
portainer is written in TypeScript 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, portainer or cds?
Choose portainer if you want the larger community (38,524 stars) or its Zlib licence terms. Choose cds if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.